This is a critically important observation. We queer people often make important distinctions between ourselves in our own minds and in how we communicate with one another. This is obviously fine. It's good that we work hard to understand ourselves and the people we form communities with.

However, members of society opposed to us for moral or religious reasons rarely care to make many distinctions.

What really matters to them, in my opinion and the opinion of serious thinkers I've read, is that we transgress expected gender norms, which they view (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) as chaotic and destructive.

Gay people betray gender norms by having sex with the "wrong" people, and trans folks betray gender norms by presenting as the "wrong" gender. Drag queens don't just betray gender norms, they celebrate it as an art form.

I'm thinking of the far right Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Green, an outspoken opponent of trans people and drag queens. She's been in the news lately because her far right boyfriend used to go on TV dressed as a woman, for laughs.

Green doesn't have a problem with that, which many people find hypocritical. It is hypocritical in many ways, but not to her. In her mind, her boyfriend isn't betraying gender norms because he's a cisgender straight man. He's not serious about his gender deviance.

Likewise, the couple have severely criticized Brittney Griner –the American soccer player recently imprisoned in Russia – for "looking like a man."

Griner is a cisgender lesbian, not a trans woman, but Green and her boyfriend are attacking her in the same ways they attack trans women — because she transgresses gender norms. That's really what they care about. Lots of people are ridiculing Green for not understanding Griner is a cisgender woman, but Green obviously knows that.

Her objections are much broader and don't always mesh with how we queer people think about ourselves.