I think recent rise in TERFism is partly a response to how trans issues became a dominant issue in feminism starting from about 2013 and some radical feminists felt that trans issues started to hijack feminism and the biologically based discrimination faced by cis women due to their ability to be forcibly impregnated and forced to carry to term became less prominent within the movement.

I do think trans people deserve their stories to be heard and for their rights to be included in intersectional feminism, because they're part of the diversity of gender experience, and transmisogyny is a form of misogyny.

At the same time, I did notice when I was running a prominent feminist Facebook community at the time (2012-2018) , that the issue of trans women's experiences became for a time disproportionately dominant within online feminism. Given that trans women make up less than 1% of the population, it was strange how for a time (and even today to an extent) it seems to take up a much higher percentage of the airwaves and bandwidth of feminist discussion than say, other minorities within feminism. The only other feminist issues that are more talked about seem to be sexual assault, and reproductive freedom.

One might say that was a response to transmisogyny and TERFism but I actually seem to recall the explosion of trans focused feminism happening before the backlash from people like JK Rowling. Perhaps it's because it's seen as controversial that it drove the Facebook algorithm and then news media to devote more and more time to the "debate" when really I think initially few people actually cared that much about whether trans women were or were not deserving of being included in feminism.

Now trans people have become a scapegoat for the right.

Trans people are important and their rights absolutely matter.

However you would expect for the amount of media coverage and debate over trans people to be more proportionate to how often they actually occur in the population.

You almost never hear about intersex people and issues of forced surgeries against them as children, despite them more common in the general population than trans people. The only time we hear about intersex people in the media is when people like Caster Semenya or that Algerian boxer from the Olympics are accused of being trans and then people go "actually they're intersex" and then the debate still becomes about trans people somehow...