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I think questions one and two are very much related.   There is such a pressure in our society to fit a social norm.  For gender to be something that is easily explainable.  People arevery often afraid of what they don't know or don't understand.  And for many people the idea of transgender is still very unknown and hard to understand.

ANything out of the norm or different is viewed as bad or scary.  I was reading my principal's speech from our graduation the other day and she had a quote from an Ani DiFranco song in it: “When I was four years old, they tried to test my IQ. They showed me a picture of 3 oranges and a pear and asked me which one was different and which one didn’t belong. They taught me that different was wrong.”  We as a society don't know how to deal with the different.  We don't understand how people can be outside the gender binary and if they consider themselves to be, we still ask them to identify with a gender.  I think people are just scared and don't want to take the time to try and understand.