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The transgender rights campaign is rather unusual. Let us examine the unusualness in its ethical claim … To begin, we can take the following as the general pattern of an ethical proposition: ‘these people, for this reason, should be treated in that way’. So, rendered into that triclausa, the ethical claim of trans(women's) rights boils down to this: a set of self-appointed men, say they are unhappy with themselves, therefore they overrule women's choices, interests, rights. Can that really be it? Let us briefly confirm this encapsulation. Any third/explanatory clause must be about a contention over scarcity. (Otherwise its scene requires no interaction, hence no harm, and so will justify no constraint.) In this case, wherever women might disagree and want some other outcome, they would have to be overruled for trans rights to be realised, so this captures the general conflict of the problem. The questionable parts of the first and second clauses is their reflexiveness: the “self-appointed” and “unhappy with themselves”. That subjectiveness and its inability to support a justification is what will now be explained in more detail.
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Consider other social justice campaigns. They would say, eg: our group is systematically underpaid, or we are regularly assaulted by police, or face social opprobrium. Notice: all are grounded on an objective measure of inequality. But trans rights has no such thing. Try this little thought experiment. Imagine society improved, and transwomen are completely safe, suffer no oppression, and so on. Would they still want to go to women's spaces etc? The answer is yes. And if we try to consult the definition of ‘transwoman’, there is no reference to anything external and abnormal; everything routes back solely to the authority of the individual ‒ you are trans if you say you are. So it very much appears that the demand is unsupported by anything objective.
That detachment gives an odd generality to trans rights' ethical basis, in that nothing bounds the claims made on others. Consider if random other groups said they were, as earlier, also underpaid, or assaulted, etc, would those justifications work for them too? Yes: the applicability is in the observable conditions, and if you have them, you qualify. So similarly, if the trans rights principle is correct, anyone should be able to use it too: they should be able to merely say they are unhappy therefore claim whatever they want. But that seems hardly plausible. We can easily see that it produces contradictions in practice: where two parties mutually claim to overrule the other on the basis only of their own preference. It is irresolvable because it lacks any objective standpoint by which to evaluate or decide.
Is not depression objective, or any other formulation of this as illness? Then that is what is treated ‒ with pharma, CBT, exercise, whatever; the (objective) melioration follows from the (objective) deficit. But with trans rights, the reason clause is disconnected from and cannot justify the demand clause. Can they not in the end say simple want is objective, in that everyone has wants and we agree on their being valuable? But they still need to explain why their want counts more in those cases, by naming some generally agreed neutral decider. Commonly it is put, maybe tacitly, that it costs little to others, and would hurt greatly otherwise. But who decides that superiority of need? Only them. Again, it is purely subjective, with recourse to nothing else. And so we remain without any arbiter.
The only thing that generates the limits of trans rights is the, one might say pseudo-science, of gender-identity. But see that it still has no objective content: there is nothing real and solid, but only a beguiling way to make it all seem so. ‘Gender-identity’ is a seemingly official label, with a weight of obscurity to it. But don't neurological analyses show distinctions of morphology etc? But so what? Even if you took a woman's brain complete and transplanted into a man's body, you would not have woman. So this can be nothing but a ploy to invest a subjective want with a false material authority. Furthermore, hypothesise someone avowedly trans yet lacking in any neurological marker, would trans rights disavow them? No, that would be inconsistent with its strong stance against conversion therapy, founded as it is on nothing other than personal identification. Once again we find no objective basis.
(If you force yourself to sample the (academic) literature on this topic, you will find they never provide anything but a subjective definition and ground of being trans. While that remains so, they can never solve the problem set forth here.)
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In sum: flat conflicts of local preference can only be resolved by some global objective, but for scenarios of claimed transgender rights there is no such basis to be found. Where they ‒ or anyone else ‒ make a claim of prejudice or oppression or so on, they are justified in remediation as anyone else on those established principles. But where they make a claim from gender-identity, ie only subjective want, they have no justification in overruling anyone else's subjective want. Maybe others will agree with their wishes, and maybe not, but no-one has any obligation to.