My story begins when I went to university. The exact school and major don't matter; suffice it to say that between going to university a while ago + going to a school that was mostly business and STEM majors, the place was not a troon breeding ground.
At this school, I made a bunch of friends. Four of them matter for the purposes of this story; let's call them Adam, Bonnie, Clyde, and Diane. At the time, three of the fout had no red flags in general and none of them had red flags for trooning out: Adam was gay (this will become relevant later) but not a flamer or degenerate or anything, he was a happy well adjusted guy who just happened to be gay. Clyde and Diane just seemed, well, normal. Bonnie was a fag hag (:islamic

and frankly I only considered her a friend in the sense that she was friends with Adam and Clyde - hanging out with those two almost necessarily meant dealing with her. We graduated but kept in touch.
Now let's fast-forward to the late 2010s:
* Even at university Adam was the kind of person that people
liked but never
loved - he had plenty of friends but struck out with every guy he dated. This left him, well, lonely and his Tinder matches started to dry up. We kept in touch routinely and I even flew out to visit him a few times. Then in around 2019 he announced via Facebook that he was dating a TiF. Adam didn't troon out or anything, he had just gotten so desperate that he decided a pooner was better than nothing. From what little I've been able to gather it's pretty clear the pooner is using him and he's too desperate or naive to realize it. I've kept in touch with him but it is
hard - I want to just yell "you can do better, can't you see this relationship is abusive?" but I know that if I say one word down that line I'll be unpersoned for transphobia.
* Like I mentioned Bonnie was a fag hag but did not have any warning signs for trooning. When we were at university her stances on marriage + family were more conservative than you'd expect for a fag hag (not tradwife but at least had the self-consistency to realize tolerating others' lifestyles meant letting women be tradwives). We kept in touch infrequently after graduating. Then in 2019 on one of the half-dozen LGBTQBBWNAMBLA sanctioned holidays she posted on Facebook "I am a genderfluid individual".... yeah, something snapped in her head and now she was your stereotypical "non binary" TiF - using it as a cudgel to get into LGB spaces (especially those for gay men since she's still a fag hag) and make herself the center of attention everywhere she goes. Any conversation with her became outright intolerable after that, and I even have to watch my words when she
isn't around since I value my friendship with Adam and he doesn't realize Bonnie trooning out is an attention grab.
* This leaves Clyde who is almost an ungodly hybrid of the problems with Adam and Bonnie: He got married to Diane, then trooned out (TiM not non binary), then moved with his wife from a town near her family halfway across the country to be near
his family. Right off the bat it created the same problems as Bonnie - any conversation with him is insufferable now, I have to watch my words when he
isn't around because I still value my friendship with Adam, and he wants a personal army to shut down evil Ron DeSantis (no he doesn't live in Florida). At least to me the worst part about it is his wife because what he is doing borders on abuse. When he first announced he was trans he made a point of saying "Diane will support me through this", which put her in an awkward and untenable position - she could either accept her husband trooning out or be banished from all
her social circles if she filed for divorce. Then he helped make that decision for her by isolating her from her entire family. Nothing would please me more than to help her get a divorce + find a support group for what she went through + move back closer to her family, but she's either too woke or too resigned to her fate to accept that kind of help.
Thanks to anybody who read this all the way to the end, the number of places where I can say this stuff openly is small and shrinking.