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This is not a good simile, regardless of whether one is on the "trans women are real women, bigots!" side of the fence or the opposite one.
To equate step-parents with trans persons, the more relevant comparison would be someone who lives three doors down from you declaring that they are the step-parent of your kids, and anyone who objects on the grounds of "you're not the biological parent" is a -phobe and an -ist. "Legally you're not the parent" "Well if it's just about a piece of paper I can always apply to adopt them!" "You're not my partner, you have nothing to do with this family!" "This is discrimination and exclusion, I'm a parent if I feel like a parent and I have always longed to be a parent and identified as a parent! I've taken parenting classes! I've read books about parenting!"
Why are you trying to stop me
running in this racebelonging to this family, you bigot?Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people? While I admit to having limited first-hand experience, that limited experience is with people who made a sincere effort to transition across both cultural dimensions as well as physically. They don't go around shrieking at people, they actually don't seem to have interactions that involve anyone suggesting anything about their gender because they (mostly) look the part of their transition (notably, these are F->M, which does generally seem more physically convincing). When someone meets Mike, Mike doesn't have to insist up and down that they're totally a guy and explain their pronouns, because Mike has short hair, a beard, and tends towards flannel and ballcaps. Whatever the philosophical position might be on Mike's sex at birth, Mike really doesn't have to yell at people about the matter or make claims that seem completely misaligned with other people's observed reality.
Of course, I'm well aware of the public examples of histrionics, and the evident madness of quite a few non-passing trans people does complicate the conversation, but I think people like Mike are actually pretty analogous to stepmoms.
It matches the experience with defenders of trans people in the media and legal system. If you're saying that trans people don't personally act much like this, and that the complaint should be about trans allies instead of trans people, I suppose that's a fair complaint. But that's different from saying that it just isn't significant at all.
Also, the backlash against FTM is lower than against MTF precisely because FTMs aren't claiming many things that cis men exclusively get, because there aren't many things that cis men exclusively get. What exactly can they shriek at cis people to do?
Parallel here: Stepmoms are encouraged to see themselves, and we encourage others to see them as, real moms because doing so is socially useful. We have no interest in seeing kids who come from broken or tragedy stricken homes raised without female caregivers, we want women to step up and take on that role even if it is not theirs by biology, so we extend the courtesy.
We live in an essentially masculinized society. The essential stereotypes of mid twentieth century man have been expanded to cover both sexes: worker, provider, leader, soldier. While there is some backwash of men moving into more feminine archetypes of homemaker, child-rearer, ornamental kept-man; I would guess that there are fewer true House-Husbands in the United States than there are female Doctors and Lawyers or soldiers. Certainly fewer house husbands than there are women who make $100k/yr at their job. A man who stays home while his wife provides is thinly tolerated and lightly mocked, at worst openly despised and denigrated. A housewife who goes through a divorce has at least a reasonable shot at finding a new husband for whom she will be the same kind of wife; I can't even imagine the same happening to a man.
Purely in traditional social roles society encourages women to become men, while at best tolerating men who become women. Transition is just the physical extreme of this trend.
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