I don’t have anything to back it up but I think it’s a large group’s correlation between trans/gay == pedophilia. When I was a kid, my mom(southern baptist republican) didn’t differentiate between gay people and illegal sexual activity like molestation(this was in the 80s). If my mom had been told that a guy that viewed himself as a girl wanted to use the girl’s restroom, she would have immediately decided it was because he wanted to do something terrible to the girls.
I think the main reason for that is because her God told her gay people were going to hell… It made it easy for her to view them as evil.