I'm sure they aren't.
But think about it like this. Every issue can be considered from multiple perspectives, depending on your motivation.
Imagine you are the parent of a 17 year old who has been on puberty blockers and cross sex hormones since they were 12 and is on the waiting list for surgery. The Cass Review is published and suddenly people like your child are the subject of newspaper headlines and dinner conversations up and down the country.
What would you rather believe? That you harmed your child by affirming their gender identity, and that, far from giving them time to think about who they wanted to be without having to go through a distressing puberty, you actually made their transgender status an inevitability and ensured that they will never have a healthy body and sex life or the ability to have children of their own? Or that the Cass Report is a load of transphobic rubbish which isn't worth the paper it's written on because it disregarded all the evidence that didn't fit its intended conclusion and didn't take into account the lived experience of trans people?
Or imagine that you are the parent of a very vulnerable adult trans woman and you read about the nurses taking the NHS to court over single sex changing rooms.
What would you rather believe? That those nurses are prejudiced against people like your child, who hasn't done anything wrong, means no harm to anyone and just wants to be left alone to live their life as the gender they identify as? Or that those nurses have a point, that they are entitled to not be forced to undress in the presence of people like your child, and that in transitioning your child has ensured they will never really fit in anywhere?
I think those parents will believe whatever fits their own preferred narrative, because the alternative is too painful to contemplate. And they will defend it to the death because they love their child.
Then imagine that one of those people has a very senior role at the Guardian, or the BBC even, and imagine what effect that might have on the organisation's editorial policy and their ability to report on these issues in an unbiased way (or their willingness to report on them at all). Or imagine that one of those people is in charge of an NHS trust, and think about what effect that might have on staff and managers who are concerned about the impact of a transgender male member of staff using women's changing rooms, or putting transgender male patients on a women only ward. It becomes very difficult to speak up, doesn't it? Especially if you have bills to pay and can't afford to get fired (like most people).
Helen Joyce is absolutely spot in when she says that just one trans child has the ability to completely paralyse any kind of sensible discussion in the organisations where their parents work or the circles they move in.
And of course, it gets worse. Imagine that one or several of those parents of a trans child is an MP. Maybe someone high up in the government, or the prime minister even. Keir Starmer is notoriously very protective of his children and their identities, and one of them has not even been named in the press. (Although it is quite easy to find out both his children's birth names if you know where to look.) Is that just to protect them from press intrusion into their personal lives at a critical point in their education? Or could one of them be trans identifying? We don't know, and it's not really our business, but the implications of that for government policy are quite scary. Voters really ought to understand whether the government has adopted a certain approach towards puberty blockers or self ID because it's genuinely what they believe having considered all the relevant evidence and viewpoints, or whether it's because one of them has a trans child and the rest don't care to upset them. (For what it's worth I don't really believe this is the case with Keir Starmer as he has rowed back from some of his previous hard lines on trans issues, so I do think he can see both sides.)
Fortunately, David Tennant is just an actor.