The internet went from an initial collection of tiny chaotic islands populated by a high proportion of open-minded (often queer or otherwise marginalised in some way within regular society) people excited about its potential, to a brutal lawless frontier where the excesses of 90's lad culture were replicated with even fewer consequences for the perpetrators of harm. It was horrendous.
The advent of the era of social media saw this digital landscape steadily colonised until it had largely become a homogenous expanse that replicated offline culture. Bigotry unfortunately reigned supreme here, as it did offline. We started seeing tone-deaf nonsense like Zuckerburg's announcement that privacy is dead and amongst those who had found refuge in the freedom of earlier online communities, there was a general sense that we were inexorably moving toward a miserable new dark age.
A significant sea change around 2012 (which had actually been gathering momentum for some time beforehand, and culminated in Laverne Cox's appearance on the cover of Time in 2014) saw the rise of a (sometimes naive and awkward) new culture of tolerance and acceptance of difference alongside a desire to see previously unpunished harmful behaviours brought to light and challenged. This mainstream expression of a new intersectional, highly race-and-class conscious feminism was unfortunately met by a fierce reactionary turn which enabled the rise of the Alt-Right in the US and set us down the road that led to the promotion of recycled Greer/Raymond-style anti-trans rhetoric into mainstream media dominance in the UK.
After it became clear that the battle to prevent gay rights from becoming legally and culturally enshrined had been lost and a new strategic approach was required, the US-based anti-LGBT Family Research Council announced a new strategy at their annual Values Voter Summit in 2017:
"The first is to "divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them."
"Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer."
"Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success."
From this new standpoint, we saw a concerted, sustained international effort to drive a wedge into the LGBT community by amplifying and weaponising the voices of existing anti-trans groups and ideologies while masking them with 'progressive' sounding rhetoric. You can see the initial attempts at this approach in evidence on the Heritage Foundation's 2017 article "How to Think About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policies and Religious Freedom"
This backswing gathered a great deal of momentum under the conservative governments in the UK and US and culminated in concerted attacks on hard-won LGBT legal protections and provisions including the imposition of several laws banning trans healthcare for children in US states and the destruction of the UK's already faltering childhood Gender Identity Development Service alongside the adoption of an anti-trans position as a major election issue.
The reactionary nature of the 'Gender Critical' movement alongside the behaviour and associations of its shadier supporters eventually proved too divisive, however, and it is currently in the process of collapsing under the weight of its own differences.
Only time will tell which of the various component groups that form the 'Gender Critical' coalition will survive the increased scrutiny that comes from such a rise in prominence.