however, video games are also consider THE safe haven for a lot of the more socially isolated and "unwanted" men who don't have much to look to forward to IRL .
the rise of the trans community starting from the mid 2010's onwards are in part, a result of them presenting a way for these lonely men to feel appreciated, to have a community they feel THEY belong to, and so more of these gamers started "transitioning", remember that they still keep their love of the vidya after this.
it's not really that the trannies invaded video games, the gamers who were already dedicated to them just simply trooned out
In a way, part of that could be seen as the side effect of 2010s Feminism. One of the main things feminists were pushing at the time was gay marriage, primarily on the lesbian side of things (Why else would 'Lesbian' be the first word in the alphabet acronym?) and this led to the social hierarchy being changed to "Men want women, but women want other women."
Because women tried to push the idea online (especially on Tumblr) that women can be just as good, if not better than men, many socially outcasted men who were into nerdy things like video games decided to troon out as a way to hopefully salvage themselves and their potential at a relationship, or fill in the hole left by them ending up as incels (Hence the "If I can't get a GF, I'll be come the GF" thing).
I think one common denominator I see in online communities both back then and now is that they share a lot in common with High School and College fraternity groups. You have a bunch of rowdy kids living and making the most out of their youth, rejecting the authority brought upon them by the adults, and being degenerates whenever the situation calls for it. Smoking, doing drugs, banging girls at parties, looking at porn mags/sites, and so on.
And it was this attitude that would become the forefront of early Internet culture on sites like Something Awful, Newgrounds, and early YouTube. The people who came to the Internet first were 20-somethings that were living their lives with that aforementioned attitude. You had people cranking out crude and crass animations as a way of sticking it to the comparatively safe cartoons meant for kids, trying to cram in all the sex jokes and swears as humanly possible not just as a way of being counter-cultural, but for it to basically be the biggest display of "F you Mom! F you Dad!" as humanly possible.
Even if a lot of these people, and the generation beneath them, would troon out, the idea of being obnoxious, annoying, and frat-like never truly went away. Only now they've basically made the fact that they're trying to be the opposite gender they were born as the core part of their personality. They'll post gifs of Neko-Arc with "cry about it" as the caption whenever people oppose them online because they never truly abandoned that ego-driven High-school-kid mentality.
It isn't just "You will never be a real woman", it's also "Deep inside, you will
always be a man."
