And here's the problem the trans community forces us to deal with repeatedly. We're constantly told that trans rights are not incompatible with women's rights, and yet we see repeated examples of women not being allowed to maintain sex specific spaces for themselves, and that women must perform the emotional labor of validating trans people.

The question is not about the rights of trans people. Rather, the question is: "Are women are allowed to say no and refuse demands that they provide validation to males who identify as trans?". I think the answer is a definite yes. After all, that validation is often in the form of autogynephilic sexual gratification, where they get a kind of sexual thrill from being treated as a woman. It does not necessarily involve an actual orgasm or such, but it's still forcing the public to engage with and be a partner (albeit a passive partner) to a fetishy activity.

Because that validation has a high chance of being tied to autogynephilia, demands that women submit to being objects of validation are inherently rapey. This is especially true with transgenderism nowadays that's trendy and very openly fetishy. Back when transsexualism was rare and always involved the care and supervision of a medical team, not to mention years of oversight beforehand so the person knew what they were committing to, there were enough hoops to jump through that the person wanting to be trans could be safely assumed to be treating a legitimate case of gender dysphoria, and not simply looking for an autogynephilic thrill. There's actually rightly more stigma nowadays on men who identify as trans in women's spaces simply because there's far less medical oversight involved, and women are safely assuming that they're dealing with a potential autogynephile.