They can be darned hard to remove and in some cases folks have put locktite on them so some heat is a good idea.
Red hot is not a good idea, but at least hot enough to smoke the oil and grease.
Until I made myself a couple of wrenches out of 3/8 x 1" bar stock, I used to use 2 crescent wrenches borrowed from work.
A 2" or 50mm or 18" crescent wrench is $50, and I didn't have a great need of one up until then.
A couple of pipe wrenches will do it but they kind of mangle the flats on the nut.
The Raptor was doubly bad in that it had a setscrew in the nut that would not come out and is too hard to drill.
Hopefully you will never come across that.
So, heat the nuts up until they smoke, protecting the carrier if you plan to reuse the seals.
Put your wrench over the inside nut with a pipe over the handle and along the floor and step on it.
Slide the other wrench over the outside nut, pipe over the handle, at about thigh height and pull the two apart. Always works, even if screechin', snappin' tight.
To get the axle out, slide a piece of tube or conduit over the axle threads (you took the axle flanges, brake and sprocket off, right?)
and pound the axle out toward the brake side. Do NOT EVER pound on the threads, even with the nut on it.
Sometimes you might get away with tapping on a nut on the threads, but just bad practice, as all the screwed up axle threads prove.