My first impulse is to say "the problem is not inside me, the problem is inside them; I shouldn't change myself to accomodate their discrimination, nor should I let them bother me". And that's probably the correct response, 95% of the time.

It's that other 5% that causes all the consternation.

There are many possible analogies, but the one I prefer is that of political partisanship. In a two-party system (like the US), when one party is in power, the minority party has many many critical things to say about the party in power. The party in power knows that, most of the time, it's just partisan trash-talking, and so they have a tendency to dismiss most criticisms reflexively.

The problem when someone is wrong 95% of the time... is that they're right 5% of the time. And in certain circumstances, ignoring that 5% of the time will get you into real trouble. For instance, in the case of George W. Bush and the Second Gulf War, GWBush thought it was okay to ignore all criticisms, even though some of the criticism was valid.

It's easy to criticize GWBush in hindsight, but it really is a signal-to-noise problem. GWBush was getting a lot of spurious partisan criticism that should have been ignored. But shutting himself off from everyone else isn't the proper response either.

My problem is that I face a lot of transphobia. I want to have an impartial group of people who can honestly critique me. Unfortunately, transphobia is SO pervasive/accepted that, right now, there are only three people in the world who I trust to honestly critique me. While I'm sure I will discover that many others are allies (allies are invisible: they don't wear a button that says "I'm a trans ally!", partly because words alone don't make someone trustworthy), it is still very hard to know whose criticisms I can trust.

And that means I am very much alone.

I am alone not only in the "I need emotional support to stay happy" sense, which I'd like to think I could live without. I'm also alone in the much more important "I need someone to call me out when I'm wrong" sense.

After some thought: Oh, I understand now! THAT is why I value cisgender allies even more than transgender friends! That was so confusing before.

GWBush did not isolate himself — he had tons of supporters who he listened to. But there are three groups of people: A) people who support you too much, and are less likely to call you out when you're doing something wrong, C) people who criticize you too much, to the point that you can't figure out which criticisms are honest and which are spurious, and B) the Goldilocks "just right" group, that supports you when it's appropriate, and criticizes you when it's appropriate.

GWBush listened to group A, (reasonably) ignored group C, BUT the real problem is that he ignored the group B people. And that does mean he was effectively isolated from any constructive feedback.