I think I can safely say, though, that cis people can't get their minds around "transgender", though, because it violates their black and white view of the world. They understand straight/gay and man/woman, but nothing that defies those categories. (I've had people stubbornly insist--INSIST--that I was in fact a gay man, for example). And what they don't understand scares them.

I'm not saying gays don't suffer from bigotry as well. Far from it. But transgendered people, it seems, are where gays were thirty or forty years ago as far as tolerance and understanding.