Back to Tony: what’s his motivation for his trans kids campaigns?
Honestly I think Tony’s a true believer. He thinks people are truly, fundamentally transgender and that intervening early with children puts them on the path to be their authentic selves.
I don’t think Tony is cynical in his motivations, even if some of his actions (eg the suicide debate) are cynical.
Tony doesn’t seem bitter about having transitioned as an adult (he’s of the “never too late” group) but he does seem to think that his life would have been better if he had transitioned as a child.
Now, if you don’t share this belief in innate transgenderism, you can pick away at exactly what psychological purposes this serves for him.
As you mention, there’s an aspect of validation — the existence of transgender children helps to dispel alternative explanations for transgender adults. ie Transgender adults are just transgender children, whose transgenderism is innate, who have grown up. I think this holds water even absent the cynical aspect of this (such as adults using transgender children to sort of hide that they transitioned because of a sexual fetish).
Personally I think this validation aspect is particularly important to Tony, even if it’s on a subconscious level. We’ve seen how in the past he has gotten very attached to seeing himself as a certain kind of person: genius-level kid who overcame his lowly origin, cool dude drug dealer, expert sociologist, etc.
However, while in the past Tony has been able to drop these and reinvent himself (something he’s talked about explicitly), he is not able to do this with transgenderism. Let alone the irreversible physical changes to his body, he faces an extreme social cost from his family should he ever decide that this was a phase, as he’s spent the past 3.5 years saying that they are bigots if they don’t accept his being a woman.
I think this is probably subconscious for Tony — as I said I don’t think he’s cynical — but I do think it drives his quite extreme positions, his blindness to inconvenient facts, his championing of child transition, and his denunciations of detransitioners.