"Americans divided on whether to randomly be assholes to children" is really a more accurate headline, but i can see why that doesn't sell.
If you insist on calling Bobby Roberta, you're as much of an asshole as if you insist on calling Bobby Robert. If someone insisted on calling me by the surname I had when i was born, they'd be as much of an asshole as if they decided to call me by the legal first name I used until 2019.
If you strip away the transphobia and justifications, it's just rudeness, and honestly, I think that's probably the winning tactic here with a lot of people. Not with the real dyed-in-the-wool bigots, but with the people who "can see both sides": ask them how they'd feel about someone calling their mother by her maiden name and refusing to use her married name (assuming her name has changed, etc.). Chances are, they'll say that's unacceptably rude, but if they reply that Mom changed her name legally, you can take one of two tacks:
Is it acceptable, then, to call a newlywed by her maiden name until the paperwork goes through legally changing her name, which can take weeks?
Is it rude to call someone who goes by their legal middle name by their first legal name? If John Alexander goes by Alex, is it rude to refuse to call him anything other than John?
What about that one guy everyone knows who goes by a nickname he's had since he was five? If Colin Martin Jr. has been called Buddy since childhood, is it rude to insist on calling him Colin, or Junior? What if he decides he's 18 now and he would rather go by Colin, is it rude to keep calling him Buddy?
If you can get through people's heads that it's just plain fucking rude to not call people the name that they ask to be called, pronouns are a relatively easy argument.
The only purpose of a pronoun - any pronoun - is to stand in for a noun in situations where it's more convenient or more grammatically sensible to use the pronoun. And once you establish that it's rude to randomly call people names that they don't go by, it's also fucking rude to call people by the wrong pronouns.
Taking that tack starts to take the legs out from under their justifications, and if the lightbulb doesn't go on over their heads, it's pretty easy to just shrug and say, "Well, maybe your momma raised you to be rude like that, but mine didn't. In my mother's house, we addressed people how they prefer to be addressed, but, you know. My mom was very big on manners and respecting others. Maybe yours didn't care about that so much." Once you hit that point, it's pretty clear that the difference is transphobia, but you can make that clear by backing them slowly into a corner where they have to admit that they're just being rude because they think trans people are icky and don't deserve respect.
I don't recommend wasting your energy like this on every transphobe on the internet, but if there's someone in your actual life that you think you can reach, this tactic, rather than falling back on "that's transphobic," or talking about suicide statistics, has proven way more useful to me. People can easily get super defensive and shut down or deflect to other arguments about ROGD and so on if you talk about transphobia and mental health in trans teens, but it's a lot harder - especially for older folx - to brush off the "hey, that's just rude, that's all it is," especially when served with a side of "well, maybe your mother raised you like that but mine didn't."
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