I'd disagree that it ends up being "left" because of academics or differences in terms of susceptibility to dubious abstract argumentation. In fact, I don't really think anyone is seriously convinced by the most sophisticated arguments, they're just parroted to avoid having to deal with criticisms of more grounded justifications. If you spend all your time talking about the social construction and performativity of gender then you needn't trouble yourself with the pragmatic questions that hinge on scientific realities where you are on very weak ground. It's actually a fairly general pattern; if your arguments are bad then you start discussing the nature of the constructs you're arguing over which delays having to deal with pragmatic considerations e.g. whether troons display sex-typical violence patterns or whatever have you. You don't even need to be intending to do this, but if you have a sense that you are going to be 'wrong' then you just greedily search for something that'll make you not wrong and a natural place to look is at a more meta or abstract level. The problem then occurs when you can never find a meta level reason to resolve your object level difficulty, so you get forever trapped in abstract nonsense.
I think the real reason why troonism is so firmly entrenched on the Left is simply because the right is comparatively inflexible. The right wing political imagination is heavily constrained in what it can accept; in general it has a very specific vision(s) of how society ought to be. Troons don't feature in it and especially not AGPs, AAPs or GAMPs.
Troons could only ever find a home on the left and the fact that no one much cares about some of the not terribly progressive elements of troonism, doesn't really matter because politics is dominated by adversarial binaries. For the vast majority of leftists, troons are essentially just one of many side issues that they symbolically support because it is the leftist thing to do then the details don't matter. Equally, because troons are on their side then they will reject, or attack any criticism of troons or any suggestion of incoherence on their part. In a way it's very similar (though a much milder) version of the Left's relationship with Islam where they will be repeatedly drawn into defending Islamist organizations/activists (i.e.
Deobandis &
Salafis) on the grounds of anti-racism/islamophobia despite the fact that these individual's beliefs could not be more diametrically opposed to left-wing opinion. In fact, it actually goes both ways to an extent with Islamists having very real sympathies for someone like Ilhan Omar who is pro-choice, pro-gay rights etc., positions which are anathema to the Islamists in theory, but can be glossed over in practice because she is both a useful vehicle on issues like Israel and India/Kashmir
and because she is (or at least they believe) on their side in any real conflict they face with the broader American civil society. All of politics is like this.
The torment of pretending to have a gender that does not meaningfully exist. The great problem of being "non-binary" is that gender is ultimately a question of how other relate to you and how they structure their expectations of you. It isn't really primarily one of aesthetics which is how most of "enbies" or indeed troons in general think about it and consequently they spend their time searching for aesthetic means to achieve the impossible. The aesthetic component of gender is really just the way in which you communicate your relationship to others but if nobody has any expectations around what a "non-binary" person is or what the normative way of relating to one is, then you cannot signal it and no matter how hard you try your gender will be resolved as female (or male if you're the pink-bearded man in pumps type of non-binary).
Now, it isn't strictly impossible for "non-binary" to be a socially valid gender (although it won't happen for a range of reasons), in a sense that's what actually happens to troons whenever you end with a sufficiently high concentration of them. Hence, Kathoeys in Thailand and apparently troons in SF:
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(h/t
@Surfin Terf )
If people get exposed to enough troons then they become a third gender (FtMs
could be argued to be a fourth gender although it might be truer to say they are just women). It's a beautiful paradox, people can believe troons are 'women' which arguably makes their gender female but only if they have met only a few apparently "normal" troons. However, because troons are so pervasively different to women
and to men (in a social sense at least) then the second you and the society you are in get a measure of them then they become a third gender since there is now some set of expectations and understandings around the normative way to interact with them.