That's absolutely the cause. Poor self esteem and a discomfort with gender roles (which the SJ crowd tends to push more than your everyday person, funny enough - even the slightest bit of nonconformity means a person or fictional character is trans) has led to a lot of people deciding to transition because they're not your archetypal, hyperaggressive, sex-obsessed frat boys. Pair that with the fact that gender nonsense is an easy way to build an identity when you're struggling with doing just that in your teens and suddenly trooning out becomes an easy and smart option. When it's not done as a fetish/for attention, it's done as a maladaptive method of coping with not fitting in with the average ("average") crowd.
I do think there are some people who experience gender dysphoria as a result of something going wrong in the womb, like an intersex condition of the brain/hormones, and similarly I think those people have a right to be treated with hormones and surgery just as physically intersexed people do, but those cases are extremely rare. The people subject to it probably don't make sure everybody and their mother knows they're ill.
