I think likewise millions or people live in the south without issues?

Sampling bias. Most of those millions of people are white, cis, straight folks who present as the gender they were assigned at birth. The odds of something horrible happening are much higher if you don't check all of those boxes.

It's still rare, but so are most horrible things that can happen to a person. "There's a pretty low risk of you getting into a car accident, so why wear a seatbelt?" because the risk, while low-ish in absolute terms, is still unacceptable - so you do what you can to mitigate it.