Serious question - why the T in LGBT?

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

2) The average joe has a negative opinion of transsexuals. It is simply being realistic to say this negative opinion probably damages the LGB movement, as many conservative backward types (of which there are many in Ireland) will get confused and associate this negative opinion with LGB.
Don't you remember when you were in school, if you were friends with someone who was unpopular, this unpopularity would rub off on you too? Obviously this is wrong but it's what humans do.

Oddly enough, I did not know this until about three years ago. I have one friend who is post op and it is never something that we discussed. I was in work and one of the part timers started talking about the issue and was quite nasty about transsexuals. Words such as disgusting and weird were used, and the guy said he felt sick at the thought. I popped in that one of my friends fell into this category and that the descriptions being bandied about were simply untrue, my friend had been a friend before and after surgery, (oddly enough I can not remember him being a woman now). I know that he was technically but I can't picture it in my head, odd how the mind works. Anyway, a few days later, my friend gave me a call and said he heard I had been talking about him (another friend of ours worked with me). I said yes but not in an offensive way, I told him about the conversation and while giving an example his first name had popped out. He explained that while he knew that I was not trying to cause any trouble, that there had been attacks where people had tracked down friends of his who were transsexual and they had been beaten by a few people to near the point of death. I was not naive enough to think that punches, fights and beatings did not happen at the time and I know there are phobics for every thing you can think of. I just hadn't put it together that there would be some who would be so far gone that they would actively hunt down people in what was supposedly modern Ireland.

The only conversation I had had with my friend before this was one night I was cycling home and I had seen him with a quite young gent, while odd I did not think anything untoward, just unusual (he had being going out with the same girl for many years). When I met him in college a few days later I had to ask and say that it looked weird (that he was out with someone that looked about 14 at 4 in the morning ). He nearly fell over laughing, the young gent was in fact older than both of us but due to hormones looked like he was about to restart puberty again.

To my point though, these monsters who hunt down people, are not the average Joe, they are the fringe element of society, unfortunately they are apparently the more accepted fringe element of society, potentially more than the fringe my friend is supposedly on.

Long story short, if it damages the LGBT movement in the eyes of "conservative backwards" types as you put it, who in the LGBT movement gives a f*ck, I certainly would not care if they felt more negatively as i don't think its possible.