Every single emotional and logical appeal that people make to those indoctrinated fails, because the devotees aren't operating on the same moral, logical, or social compasses that we are. What we value has been informed by our ability to connect with the world, however difficult that was, and what they value has instead arisen from their inability (or perceived inability) to connect; thus this idea of "self-realism" springs forth, as an expression that their own moral/logical/social systems have been almost fully constructed by the imagined reality that they've conjured up in their heads, with an alleyoop assist from the internet.
I think the reason it's often so frustrating to see this happen, and to feel powerless, is that we know for many of these people - it isn't an innate inability to connect with the world. It's a perceived inability, fed and encouraged by too much time mistaking internet community as interchangeable with real community. I don't personally fall in well with the zeitgeist or dominant acceptable norms of behavior among just about any social group, which made being a teenager and young adult somewhat cumbersome. But I was convinced that there was "something more" out there, and searched around to find a niche for myself - a relationship between my own personal systems and the societal ones around me, which is obviously still evolving. It was a rewarding and often uphill struggle, but in a world of convenience - that's a tall order, particularly since it necessitates treading unsteady, unfamiliar ground. It ultimately explains why I feel sympathy for people who get suckered into this stuff, because they're outcasts and oddballs that refuse to accept that being atypical is fine, if prone to a little more soul-searching. This is obviously a different case from the trenders, who belong to the "in" group but are shopping for fashion.
I've been reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind," and he has a segment discussing the relation between systematizing and empathizing which happened to catch my eye. Great moral philosophers developed systems of morality which they themselves didn't necessarily click with, if only because their lacking empathetic qualities left them largely unable to form meaningful (or at least complete) connections with other people. We note that a lot of people who are drawn into the troon cult, regardless of age, exhibit signs of autism spectrum behavior or otherwise have difficulty forming steady emotional connections with others - if not ipso facto, then post hoc. I suspect that many of them are systemic thinkers who crave a cause for every effect on themselves. Feeling disharmony with the systems they feel they're "supposed" to belong to, they search endlessly for meanings and explanations that aren't there, in a vain and immature effort to codify all human behavior and impulses. You can see this in the fact that so many of them "rebel" against the prevailing social current... by just listlessly adopting some other social current: similar dress, style of speech, political beliefs, etc etc. Rather than take on the task of acknowledging dissonance between yourself and prevailing social currents, and forming connections and relationships and a distinct moral matrix through analyzing and experiencing these incongruencies, these people effectively try to plug in a thumb drive of moral systems and behavior to themselves to 'feel' connection, to install a new moral OS that will remove some of the performance issues of the old one.
This obviously fails to stymie increasing anomie, all while removing other bulwarks against it - family, friends, community, responsibility, etc. Eventually obvious dissonances between the individual and the moral matrices they've tried to foist on themselves emerge, which is why you see such rabid adherence to doctrine in a desperate attempt to cling on to those adopted systems -- sunken cost fallacy, because if you've thrown away so much time and money and relationships in a desperate attempt to 'create harmony' between yourself and the world, and in reality all you did was bring in further disharmony, it's an uncomfortable thing to accept that often prompts searching for yet-another system to try to graft onto yourself. In the end, the individual connects even less with the world around them, and is forced into even more disconnected communities in the desperate search for 'order,' which carries on until an eventual breaking point.
This spins right back around to why I find myself a "truscum" person -- for the "true" trans person, they have such a fried brain beset by mental illness that presenting as the opposite sex is their means of connecting to other social/moral/etc systems. The "true" trans person acknowledges that they are their birth gender, and will never flip sexes, but also acknowledges that the disharmony they feel between "expected" norms and their own personal ones has pathologized into a mental illness that requires such drastic behavioral changes to tether them to others in the world. By contrast, the modern day equivalent are simply cadres of people feeling anomie, who could explore and find their own unique, specific ways to interface with broader matrices -- but they don't wanna put in that effort. They graft the trans ideation onto themselves, undertake the ritual, and believe - because they've been told - that this will allow them to interface with the world better, and to not feel so disconnected.
Though it is also disingenuous of me to say they don't want to put in the effort per se - for many, I feel they don't even realize that they can put in effort to this sort of thing. Sure, there are some that are just lazy, but I would wager many of these individuals... have been so socialized by pop culture and the faux-"lives" that people present in media and social media alike, that it genuinely never crossed their mind that grappling with your own personal relationship to the world and society you exist in is both a mundane and a frequent thing, and that people do not in reality ever find a 'niche' in which they never buckle or grapple with prevailing currents or alternative systems of morality. It sounds autistic as fuck to think that anyone could really be this clueless, but that's because these people tend to be autistic as fuck