"Why wouldn't you travel by main roads?"

Episode 1, The End's Beginning - Geralt

What I aim to do here is track what we see and connect pieces together. I will leave it to other people to do truly in-depth analysis that connects up to real-world things and turn up interesting ideas. It's also just going to be about the show canon, although I'll be considering book canon for clarity on some of the elements.

Let's start with the main character, Geralt, and Episode 1, The End's Beginning.

After a fight scene with a monster, Geralt enters a tavern and has a brief civil interaction with a barmaid, Isadora, only for her to be pushed aside by the tavern-owner who hates witchers enough to want him gone now, a sentiment echoed by a number of other men in the place.

It is, I think, worth mentioning that this does not appear to come from a place of fear:

"You don't give the orders around here, you mutant son of a bitch."

"Go. On your own or at the end of a rope, your choice."

And when Geralt turns as if to leave, the men make it clear that he doesn't even get that choice, they've decided on a lynching.

"Yeah, fuck that. Kill him with your bare hands if you have to."

"C'mon, Witcher. You're not scared of us, are ya? Show us what you've got."

"Witchers can't be trusted."

The anti-witcher sentiment is based on broader anti-human prejudice, not that witchers are legitimately frightening. If mankind fears that which is different, they don't fear it in the sense it's physically scary to them. These men expect him to back down (they mock him for being scared of them) and the final jab before Renfri steps in is that he can't be trusted. When accusing witchers of being no better than the monsters they hunt, they don't mean in the sense witchers are as likely to kill people, they mean that as non-humans their loyalties are suspect.

And it is probably not a coincidence that what we see is highly gendered. Even if we discount Renfri as having her own reasons, Isadora doesn't have any problem talking with him. And Marilka is probably not a good enough actor for all her enthusiastic prattling to be part of tricking him into visiting Stregobor. It's the men who are aggressive, likely because a witcher is doing a traditionally masculine role in killing very dangerous things the rest of the community couldn't and because he's just big and scary enough they think they can show off they're even tougher by harassing him.

Which is not to say that women necessarily disagree on him being inhuman. Marilka's chatter is heavy on other women:

"Isadora said you were looking for my father. She's a gossip, you see. Probably went two steps into the Lord's Inn before she was running off telling everyone an evil witcher had arrived."

Possibly this is putting words in Isadora's mouth because Marilka's heard elsewhere that witchers are evil, but if Marilka knows Isadora as a gossip, she's likely quite familiar with the sort of things Isadora says. Even people who are civil toward a witcher still believe them to be other. (As we will shortly see repeat with Stregobor.) That said, Marilka is wrong about what actually happened with Isadora (she didn't walk in, see him, and run out, as Marilka suggests, she spoke to him and only left after she was ordered to get away from him) and she still seems to have been helpful since she told Marilka that Geralt was looking for her father, which would've resolved the situation he was in.

"My mother says you're the offspring of foul sorcery, a diabolic creation, a filthy degenerate born of Hell."

Here we get the strongest statement against Geralt all episode. Again, the emphasis is not on what Geralt does or might do, but what he is. And this fits with how at episode's end, Geralt is going to kill most of the people initially trying to pick a fight without much effort and everyone is going to be shocked that the witcher they hated did a bad thing, because the prejudice against witchers has everything to do with what they are. From this, it seems like Geralt's tolerance for this sort of behavior is a standard trait of witchers. People do not expect violence from them and presumably behave this way to witchers regularly without consequence. Witchers must largely respond by either peacefully leaving or minimally defending themselves to make the other party back down.