Apologies for the length of this, you don't have to read it.
I became aware of 'Trans' as a thought experiment in 1990s academia. The period when postmodern culture, 'queer theory' as a branch of 'identity theory' and multiple -isms began to dominate my subject-area and - at varying speeds - all the others. At the time, it was just so much academic noodling, destined, I assumed, to stay on the academic holodeck and so just more interesting strands of conversation.
At the time, a respected female academic wrote a small medical sciences paper in which the notion of 'trans-sexuality' was compassionately cited as a kind of sex/gender cognitive dissonance and problem of embodiment. I used to use it in teaching. By about 2014, I realised I couldn't use it for political reasons. Over the next four years, I dropped most of the 'gender' topics in my teaching - it had become an 'eyeroll' topic, and a switch-off for male students who found it uncomfortable (a.k.a 'boring') and female students who were so often influenced by cool boys.
Anyone who thinks that's my failure should contemplate the huge pressure to satisfy student-customers on bulk undergrad courses which was rising in UK universities. In my HEI, courses were reviewed at the end of the academic year, and any which didn't achieve a high enough popularity rating were replaced.
It's also the case that too many 'feminist' academics writing about gender more or less abandoned empiricism from the '90s on, preferring a self-referential trail of citations of 'culture' and 'theory' and 'progressive' politics. And all the earlier feminist analysis written about language and gender was drowned in postmodern, intersectional soup when Trans NewSpeak came into universities.
I realised the heat was being turned up when I was screamed at by a mature 'neuro-divergent' male student at the beginning of hashtag no debate when I prevented him from shouting at an 18-year-old girl who had said, innocently, that transwomen were 'not biologically women'. The aftermath of that taught me that management would not support me in any crisis caused by 'Trans Issues'.
The first time I realised theory had become practice and was lurching down to the village was when a social work friend told me she'd had an 'awareness training' session from a transwoman who had cited all the poorly-researched 'stats' about murdered transwomen and told them that if they failed to treat him/her in all aspects as a woman, they were acting illegally and s/he would be able to prosecute them. This was around 2016 and I was hearing about the self-certification proposals re GRA for the first time so was already looking for discussion on the net so would have found MN somewhere at that point.
There's a paper to be written on The Hayley Cropper Effect because I suspect this popular representation of a nice, quiet, post-surgical transwoman was in the minds of the over 30s when the GRA then self-cert was in play and when TRAs began to be more active. I remember the campaign about Hayley getting her birth certificate changed, very sympathetic - and why not? A damaged, dysphoric Harold, part of a tiny demographic, who just wanted to live peacefully - and you were never really reminded of Harold since nice Hayley was played by a woman.