Try being (as a thought experiment) a parent of a transgender son (that is, a man who thinks he is in some undefined sense a woman), who demands that you call him “she”. The cognitive dissonance is crippling; every sentence referring to him gets painfully sidetracked into the distress of your whole previous, and indeed present and future, relationship with your son being denied. You lose track of what you were trying to say.
Add to that the threat of him “going no contact”. This is usually an implied threat, but it is real. You have done your best for your son throughout his life. You have loved him since you witnessed his birth, or since you gave birth to him (in which case your relationship goes back even further). Now he is telling you that all that relationship was untrue, because he is really a woman, but you know that that is only his view based on his view of “herself”. He can deny the reality of his sex, but he is trying to force you to do this too.
Now call him “she” and “her”. This is a cruel demand of the trans ideologues who impose their worldview on everyone else.
For me, it is easier to call someone by the wrong sex pronouns, or to use “they”, if I am not close to them. But this reinforces the expectation that all of us must do as we are told, rather than have the freedom to use language instinctively as it has been used for the bulk of our lives. It becomes cruel when it is enforced. Actually none of us has a right to impose on anyone else how that person has to see us and relate to us. No healthy relationship is based on such imposition. All healthy relationships are based on how the participants see each other, not on how the participants wish each other to see them.
When you demand that people ignore their perceptions, the evidence of their eyes, you coerce them into lying, or at best pretence. I have no right to demand that you pretend to see me in any particular way. You, if you met me, would no doubt see an old man. That is reality. If I would prefer you to see me as a younger woman, is that not ridiculous? Why should you have to deny the reality you see to pander to my feelings or wishes? The usual answer is that you should just be kind. But that, as I have tried to show, has consequences - the well known ones that adversely affect women (when I claim that I am actually a woman, so have a right to enter your changing room), and the less visible ones, like the effect on my wife who doesn’t deserve to be gaslit.