What is it about porn that makes people want to troon out?
In his book Abstraction and Empathy, Wilhelm Worringer came up with a great phrase that covers alotta ground: "Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self enjoyment."
Worringer was an art historian. He had a theory that some cultures preferred representational depictions over abstract ones due to their spiritual outlooks, not the level of their intelligence. (Egyptian and Japanese art were considered "primitive" because they weren't "realistic" to 3 point perspective loving Western eyes. Blah, blah, bigotry, etc.)
But he made a valuable observation: that people project themselves into whatever they're viewing, reading, hearing, etc., and imagine what it's like to be there. Their ability to comfortably project themselves into the art determines whether it works for them aesthetically or not.
Anyway: It's been noted over and over that troons start out projecting themselves into the men they see in porn, but somewhere along the line they switch to imagining themselves as the women. And then they start identifying as women.
I get that, but that doesn't explain how it triggers the troon within them in the first place. I guess we'll never know.
Mirror neurons. They fire in our brains when we watch and do things. They're very handy for learning new skills. They also inspire
empathy towards what is observed. So there's evolutionary social and emotional components to them too. Bonding for survival. I suspect that with the right combination of observations and actions, empathy sends the gooning male over the reality fence into the greener grass of identifying as female. (And vise versa with our Yaoi fans.) They project themselves into the scene, get aroused, feel the empathy and get the dopamine hit from the coom. (Fandom is another, deeper level of rewarding immersion. Girlie style.) Since being a gender special is a common enough and socially acceptable thing nowadays, the troon (or pooner) question gets raised in their head and gets embraced. Deeply and
emotionally.
Now if you don't have much in the way of emotional intelligence or resilience, I suspect you're more prone to troon out than someone who does.
Humans have used meditative, repetitive, ritualistic or ceremonial actions to change consciousness and experience supernatural states ever since the dawn of time. They are the tools of magic and religion. Thanks to our liberally permissive modern world and the internet delivering a vast selection of experiences that you can project yourself into, those tools are being used for trooning and pooning out via porn and Yaoi. For maladaptations. Human consciousness is being changed, but not for the betterment of humanity.