The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?

Your statement can be reversed amasingly. It is easier to proof that it is your side of frontline who does not care about searchability than what you have said. And therefore it is easire to suspect you in promoting an old Klaus Schwabbe's fairytale about DEI missvalues. There are no reasons of calling one person as "they" because we use to call a person who will always have hairs on his face as "male".