There's a lot of violence against trans people in the US. In fact, transvestites have been involved in significant amounts of violence for decades.

This is almost entirely due to the prevalence of sex work among transvestites both now and historically.

but I mostly see it as mental illness in the same way I look at furries. Furries don’t dress up like animals, they dress up like cartoon anthropomorphized animals they grew up liking. In the same way, I think trans people grew up with games and media and came to wish they were like that,

I disagree. Furries want to fuck Renamon and Crystal Fox. These are explicitly feminine athrophomorphized characters. I'd argue that it's not a mental illness, but the result of operant conditioning.

A trans person with gender dysphoria doesn't want to be a trans woman, they want to be a woman. However, the troons and drag queens we see aren't trying to be women, they're trying to be caricatures of women. They are minstrel shows of women.

Furries and people with gender dysphoria have more respect for the source material.