For about half a year, I was substituting while I worked on a vocational cert. One day, I had to bring the kids in to the school's science fair.
Like half the projects were shit like "Does Gender Identity Correlate to Intelligence?" and similar nonsense.
Granted, this school always largely served as a refuge for socially incompetent weenies who would've been eaten alive at a "normal" school. When I was a student there, we had a group of kids who actually fucking wore pin-on tails.
As I understand it, the postmodernization of gender is intended to liberate oneself from the social or emotional baggage of their biological sex. Both men and women have certain social expectations placed upon their behavior; men must be X, women must not be Y, normal people shouldn’t do Z. If you experience some emotion or trait that society deems deviant, there is subtle social pressure to conceal or suppress it, which causes emotional distress. Declaring yourself to be both genders, neither, or somewhere in between, relieves that social pressure and allows you to express your feelings fully.
Just one problem: the other 99% of the world doesn’t give a fuck about your feelings. To them, you’re still just a man or a woman, albeit with some character traits that are atypical for your gender. Pointing this out causes distress, since it reinforces the gender norms that distressed them in the first place, especially if they have spent too much time in a hugbox where their deviant traits are celebrated. Ironically, such groups create their own code of social rules, and ruthlessly expel those who do not abide by them.
The hypersensitivity to contrary views is very telling, since it shows that they are still very much bound by the dominant social paradigm. They’ve just gone underground, and tried to pretend the outside world doesn’t exist by surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, which is easy to do on the Internet. All this does is redistribute the emotional burden of being deviant. They sure as hell aren’t liberated, they’ve just created a new social prison that is more palatable. (Other groups do this too, such as the fat acceptance crowd.)
And of course, there are some who do it because it’s hip and trendy, and they want to be popular and special snowflakes too. They also get an emotional shot in the arm that comes from being perceived as being well-liked and cool. What better way to express your rebelliousness and freedom than by agreeing with everything your social betters tell you?
I think all of this stems from a desire to protect kids from harm. Helicopter parents who see their child in distress swoop down to soothe them, and tell them they don’t have to do that thing they find uncomfortable. But what happens when said uncomfortable activity is basic social interaction? As they retreat into their own social bubble, their ability to handle other stressors in their own lives atrophies. No wonder that their reaction to reality butting into their lives is incoherent rage and/or running back to the hugbox in tears.