Cross sex hormones and sausage flipping have been around for decades. Generations of drag performers entertained their fellow gays for these decades without trooning out.
Are DQs even bottoms? They aren't trying to pass as women, but play an exagerated caricature of one. They thrive in sausage central instead of invading women's spaces.
Chicken/egg. Both could have existed without much cross-pollination, that is until this particular era of the Information Age made it possible for your average corn harvesting, fishing holing, church going dude from Flyover, Kansas to have access to such information in the pocket of his weathered dungarees, among other things.
Today, it is indiscernible where drag ends and troon begins, one, because gays aren't relegated to their designated spaces anymore; and the inherent inclusivity of the community cannot even allow demarcations within. There may be policing in certain sectors, but it all looks the same to a normie.
Plus, drag representatives shot themselves in the foot with their open indoctrination attempts. So while it may be true that the queen reading a "You Can Be Whatever You Want" book to a room full of 7-year-olds has, is, and will always be a gay man, they just set off one (or five) impressionable children on a troon trajectory. Because, a child doesn't understand nuances. It is very binary for them. So, if a little boy, for example, sees a man dressed like a woman stating that they can be whatever they want, they're going to conclude they can
be a woman. And only come to understand the minutiae way late in the game, when they're on their 17th revision or on the detrans side realizing, "Yeah, I probably could've just been gay. I wish I knew..."
To that end, talk about invalidating spaces: While there once was a societal contract between DQs and the more tolerable normies to "do that drag thing over there," the whole Drag Time Story Hour effectively broke that contract. Thus, in my eyes they're just as a menacing pest as troons (which, again to a normie all looks the same to them).
The only way DQs wouldn't have been seen as a sister to transgenderism is if they disavowed loudly and early. But they didn't, nor could they, for obvious reasons.