The thing is whether it's anti-blackness, islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, antifemininism, transphobia or any number of other bigotries, these kinds of people have centuries of history of Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children Women
and it is completely morally consistent if you subscribe to the central idea of cisheteropatriarchy which is, of course, that Women Are Not Really Whole People With Agency.
trans women can't really be women because they would have to go from being a Person to Not A Person and that isn't possible so they must be lying
trans men can't really be men because you would have to be able to make a decision to become a person, and if you don't have agency and personhood you can't make decisions, so they must be deluded and led astray by men (who are capable of agency)
cis women can't have independent thought or form opinions without being told what to think by men. so if they disagree with me, A Man, they're wrong (and probably being fed lies by Lying Men)
Women (which we imagine as a biological category) are valuable and vulnerable objects of male ownership that can easily be stolen, damaged, or deluded into thinking, for example, that they're capable of independent thought and opinions separate from men. so they must be Protected.
Women are also categorised as Basically Large Children and therefore must be parented by men; they don't know what's good for them and if they're not shepherded and controlled they'll do the metaphorical equivalent of touching the hot stove. Women and children, lacking agency, are just empty vessels that anyone could fill with good or wicked ideas or could convince to accept harm (thereby damaging them).
Bonus idea: Rape Is A Thing That The Bad People Do therefore anything The Bad People do is ontologically rape and the only people who could do rape are The Bad People. this is part of why communities organising specifically around Protecting The Women And Children from trans people/migrants/Muslims/The Gays/Black people/etc are absolutely riddled with known nonces and wifebeaters who see no contradiction in this because if THEY do it it's fine
harm to women and children under cisheteropatriarchy is not defined as 'women or children experiencing pain, suffering, violence or coercion', it's defined as 'outsiders doing damage to Our Women' (and the damage could be material, in which case it's effectively a crime of vandalism or theft, or it could be Making The Women Disagree With Us, which is conceptually a similar type of vandalism/theft.)
Women and children are owned, both by a specific individual man (husband, father, son, brother, in that order) and by The Men (eg white English men) and that ownership can be confirmed through who has sexual/reproductive control, through who is permitted to commit violence against them, and through whose ideas they receive and parrot (which is all women and children can do. because we're not people capable of independent thought)
Protecting The Women and Protecting The Children, therefore, is a driving principle in the same way as protecting a really expensive computer that can easily be convinced to brick itself and has no way to prevent people from stealing it or throwing it down the stairs. Which is entirely consistent with not needing to listen to actual women.
this is the consistent undercurrent of so many reactionary conversations. and that's partly why any response to transphobia, racism, anti-migrantism, and other strains of reactionary thought have to include a feminist framework. because even when it's not directly targeting women (which transmisogyny and lesbophobia Definitely Are), misogyny is still baked in at the absolute foundation stone of these arguments and of these ideals and anxieties.
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