From my experience, at the very least most of these people are unfortunately real.

I'm on some trans discords, some of them requiring additional verification, and they certainly have anime/picrew profile pics and have a no-compromise-no-matter-what purity test mentality. A lot of online trans communities are like this, and because these people want to fit in, they radicalize to the same degree as everyone else.

To give an idea what's going down in these discords, I decided to drop in to one and look at it and they took great offense to the anime/picrew pfp shade. This is a real outrage unfortunately.