You're allowing trolls to transform a perfectly ordinary word into a slur. There are thousands of artists right now who have nothing against trans people using it to tag their work. You're estranging yourself from them when you assume that they're doing so with malicious intent. If outrage continues to mount, a lot of artist (like myself at the moment) will end up in the crossfire. When that happens, they're not going to go after the trolls that started this but the people telling them to watch their language. Not all of them will attempt to reach out and explain their thinking as I am, more than likely they will simply throw more crude language in your direction.
As you've said: "slurs hurt people", so a lot of people will get hurt if we nurse every newborn piece of slang to maturity.
Out of polite respect, I can avoid using it in conversations with you or other people who may find it uncomfortable. I am not however going to scrub an incredibly useful and commonly used search term from my vocabulary because some joker somewhere decided to use it as an insult.