I'm with Bonk on the IDGAF area of the response spectrum.
As with a lot of things, when people win new 'freedoms' they tend to want to openly express them, 'flaunt' them, share them, whatever, and given what tend to be long periods of shame, oppression, ignorance, etc... There tends to be a desire for open acceptance and acknowledgment by those around them.
Almost a sense that all 'normal' people were in some way complicit, and now the way to show that you are accepting involves going out of ones way to illustrate acceptance.
An oft overlooked consideration is that true acceptance often manifests itself with an IDGAF attitude, like "why am I supposed to care about this, just carry on and self-identify how you will". Like Bonkie says, if I address you the wrong way, just correct me in a way that understands that I meant no disrespect, I just had no idea you needed something different, and lets carry on...
Like a lot of social justice issues, the pendulum tends to swing back in the opposite direction before settling closer to the middle again. A certain flamboyance and in-your-face attitude seems necessary until things settle back into a more central area. Maybe that's how you make a culture accept things relatively quickly, having something in your face certainly makes one think and digest things rather than being able to out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
Interestingly enough the transgendered issue leads to bureaucratic and administrative changes as well since it deals with signage, bathroom availability, language, and gender. I mean, with racism and homosexuality, language, gender, bathrooms, etc... stayed relatively static. The biggest change was internal, people just had to learn (and still learn) to accept people for who they are. This new gender issue has added a whole laundry list of new changes, and there isn't an exact change even that needs making.
Then of course there is the issue of what make look like a boy in a what looks to be a girls bathroom... This is an area that leaks in to sex, sexuality, and the North American notions of sexual fear and protection of youths from 'it'. It is quite likely that an inherent fear of sex (sexual conservatives, religious notions, etc..) is at the root of these 'disruptions' of the 'safe' and 'normal'.
I know I'm not digging super deep into this, but it does raise so many questions, and as is often the case, the deeper you look into these types of issues, the more you find yourself actually looking deeply into yourself.
