Ok, so how do you account for the sudden rise in people claiming trans identity? The answer I usually get is “greater social acceptance” but that doesn’t work. If it was purely a result of changing social attitudes, then you’d expect to see the rate of aberrant identities increase across all age groups. Instead we see a dramatic increase in Gen Z, a decent increase for millennials, and no statistically significant change in other age groups. This fact alone completely dunks on your claim, I shouldn’t have to explain why
Aberrant identities (troonsgenderism, ___sexual, etc) are primarily a social fad. When I was in highschool, some kids dyed their hair and wore all black. Now that same type of kid will instead become a sapiosexual demiromantic transmasculine something-or-other.
This hits the nail on the head. The issue is how people conceive of identities, and the difference between an identity as a mechanism for political action and solidarity, and an identity as a personal branding choice and a commodity on social media. The modern gay-rights movement, after several sputtering starts going all the way back to the 19th century, forms and succeeds in unifying gay men, transsexuals and lesbians in response to the existential threat of AIDS, because it was meant as a mechanism for political action. Prior to that point you had things like political lesbianism that literally pulled the groups apart. There is nothing inherent in the LGBTQ label that means that all these groups should work together, other than being loosely interrelated in their origins and their marginalization. Lesbians did not have a higher threat of AIDS, in fact they had a lower threat than the general population, but part of the political planning was making sure that the groups being unified would have the political staying power to push for change over the course of years. The modern gay identity is a political tool unifying people who are only otherwise similar by their choice of who to love and who they have sex with. This is how all political identities function, the identify a common problem for people to rally around.
And historically the trans identity was folded in to the gay identity, for good reason because most transsexuals were homosexuals with effeminate or masculine gender presentations trying to fit into a society that would hate them less as their opposite gender, then they would as their own gender but breaking gender stereotypes. One of the founders of queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, was ambiguous in her writing as to whether or not she would've transitioned if society had been more accepting of her just being in effeminate gay man. There was a point where the assumption was that gays and lesbians had "inverted" genders, and that transitioning was the best solution, and there are places like Iran where the current solution to being gay is to transition. So it's impossible to disentangle the history of trans people as an identity from gay and lesbian history. The idea that "transness" has always existed in its modern form in history is wrong. Even the two-spirit term that Tom loves to appropriate is a modern label coined in 1990. The actual terms used across North America usually translated more closely to "men who act like women", or "women who act like men". And in those cases it was describing both gender performance and sexual preference. The only one I know of that was sort of conceived as "half man,half woman" was the Navajo, and in this case it specifically referred to effeminate men who wanted to have sex with other men.
The identities that people have on Tumblr and Facebook though are not this type of identity. They're insane atomisations of every single facet of a person's existence, combined with a bunch of made-up nonsense, to sell the idea of uniqueness and trade on the perceived trauma of existing in these identities, because trauma is a ticket to fame in the modern world. If you are chosen to be the spokesperson for whatever group of people that you are supposedly representing, you best believe that you need to have some sob stories about how much you've suffered for who you are, because that is modern US society in particular judges you worthy of being listened to. It is literally who is the most special suffering snowflake. That's why you have these nonsense sexual identities like "I'm a sapiosexual, meaning that I only like smart people" or "I'm demisexual, meaning that unlike those whores, I only have sex with people I like as friends first". Even asexuality is basically a commodity now. The first person to really identify themselves as asexual was Temple Grandin, and that's because she was so severely autistic she couldn't imagine ever having relations with another person. Now you have a bunch of kids say "I'm asexual because I'm 12 and haven't experienced horniness yet" or "I am an asexual romantic in that I want a boyfriend, but don't want to have sex" said at 15. Effeminate dudes identify as non-binary, even thought they are exactly the same as effeminate men have always been. It's basically all just a new type of otherkin. Back in the hey-days of that movement there were tons of people claiming species dysphoria on Tumblr.
Tom was pretty clearly a forerunner in the second group. What exactly is womanhood to Tom? Nothing but a way to go on maudlin diatribes about the suffering that he been through because of his identity. It is literally the first thing that he'll say whenever he's phoning any authority figure that he's tried to get help from. He obviously is not concerned about actually transitioning, or fitting in to society in any way, but trading on the trauma that his identity gives him access to to claim moral superiority over others. He is really a proto-transtrender.
Edit: I apologize for these somewhat spergy rants but if you ever needed to find one example of all the ways someone can be a bad trans person, it's Tom. He's like the perfect example of how sexual and gender politics has gone totally off the rails.
