I can't help but wonder if this pivot was concocted in some right-wing think tank somewhere.

It literally was. I don't have the source at hand right now, but not too long ago there was this reveal that the modern anti-trans push with all the scientific-sounding nonsense was concocted by a specific religious group or think tank in the US. Because they were losing the anti-gay culture war, they decided on taking a different approach by focusing on a group that most people know little about: trans people. I also remember reading about how many of those transphobic "LGB" groups in the UK are being funded by religious organizations in the US. It's all part of their strategy to weaken and divide the LGBT community so that it becomes easier to pick them off one by one. Trans people are only the beginning for them. Any queer person who isn't trans and thinks they'll be safe because they aren't trans, is truly deluding themselves.

This is also how you get people being able to use wedge issue shit like transgender women in sports and "being deeply concerned about protecting children" to allow transphobia to flourish. It sounds like such a good-faith, logical concern rooted in a solid sense of rationality to your average person who knows jack and shit about trans people, so there surely can't be any harmful rhetoric going on behind that, right!? All this and the "scientific" mumbo jumbo you're referring to is combined to make trans people look like a fringe bunch of "crazies" who don't deserve basic human consideration to so-called "normal people."

If establishment liberals had any political instincts whatsoever, they'd be countering this pivot with something like, "The right talks big about freedoms, but dumps you the second you stop conforming. Rhetorically, you can counter both anti-trans sentiment and dovetail into pro-choice abortion rights with this approach... instead, they've decided on neoconservative war-hawking. Yay.

I once shut down a lobby of angry, hateful gamers with "The most important freedom, for your typical yankee, is the freedom to tell people they're doing freedom wrong"

A lot of this rhetoric only ever works when people have never encountered nor will ever encounter a trans person. Trans people aren't real to a lot of Americans. There's very little visibility or understanding. You ask a person to name someone trans and the only name they'll have is maybe Caitlyn Jenner. They might know Lia Thompson or Chelsea Manning if they're slightly more tuned in.

But most Americans still haven't encountered trans people in their daily lives, it's a pure abstract concept. It's all imaginary mind palace games, so of course it's gonna get couched in pseudoscience terms.

The average American probably can't describe the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman, by the way. It's all considered the same thing. I'm personally a non-binary agender person who prefers she/they pronouns while also preferring to present masculine, so imagine how they'd interpret any of that.

Class society needs a self-justifying ideology. Christianism wasn't working so well at reinforcing the patriarchy, so it adapted it into "rationalism" (a less obvious form of Christianism).

It also serves to divide and conquer. Historically, many of the most vocal activists for the LGBT community have been its trans members. As I tell the LGB people who don't really understand the T aspects of these things and make arguments towards calming things down and returning to normalcy, if you think they will leave you in peace after they cut out trans people, you are sorely mistaken.

It probably fits under an umbrella of pseudo science the right has been doing. That is a very astute observation though. I too have noticed how they moved on to primarily focus their attacks from gay to trans people but hadn't thought more in depth. Possibly another factor is that religion has been falling out of favor with younger people. That messaging resonated very strongly with older generations. To reach the kids these days you have to sound scientific.

For a while it was looking like the whole idea that younger generations were going veer unequivocally into progressiveness was looking like a sure thing. The right wing parties were considered by the younger generations to be antiquated political ideologies of their grandparents generations. No young person wanted to be associated with conservatism. At least not outside of their own echo chambers. In the later half of the 2010s the right was was able pivot and suddenly become fashionable with the kids these days. I would attribute that to primarily to their shift from religion to phony rationalism.

bit idea: start bashing Christianity by saying that it's people putting their feelings above objective reality. Say that people use the bible to try and cope with their moral dysphoria. Suggest that, instead of going to church, they get a life.

"I feel like I can respect some people who are spiritual. But others make it their whole personality and go hang out with shamans in Peru. And then some people want to completely ignore the biological reality of death, become a Christian, and start walking around in public in robes and a bible."

pls never use the word "hip" again

i found this poll and it did surprise me a bit (cw: transphobia). it seems like millennials, gen x, and boomers don't really have any stark differences? and gen z + zillennials only seem to lean pro-trans despite being overwhelmingly pro-gay

That's just a matter of LGBT rights shifting from same sex attraction to gender stuff. A rationalist argument against homosexuality doesn't really work as well as a religious one and a religious argument against gender is flimsy at best.