I’m reading this essay and thought it might be something others would find interesting. It’s focused on the USA but American culture exported itself here so it’s still applicable.
I’ve included some sections below to give a flavour of the piece.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-trans-activism-became-so-radical
How Trans Activism Became So Radical
The trans movement won the lottery. Then they lost it all.
As the backlash to transgender activism went mainstream in the United States, so havepostmortems of the movement. A sharp declinein public support now has large majorities of Americans rejecting policies such as trans women in female sports, which a 2025 New York Times/Ipsos survey found 79% of Americans and 67% of Democrats opposed. In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that states had the right to ban youth gender medicine. And in 2024, President Donald Trump soared to electoral victory on the wings of his “Kamala is for They/Them” ad campaign, which, according to an analysis by the super PAC Future Forward, shifted the race 2.7 points in his favor among voters who saw it. With progressives’ iron grip on the culture loosened, and trans politics definitively revealed as a losing political issue for Democrats, commentators have fallen over themselves to criticize the counterproductive aspects of trans activism, or to suggest alternative policy approaches. But when writers and talking heads assess “what went wrong,” they usually do so through the lens of “what did the trans movement do that caused such a fierce backlash?” The question that often goes unasked is: “How and why did the trans movement become so radical in the first place?”
The answer is layered and multifactorial, but it also boils down to human nature: trans activists tried to bully their way to progress because they believed they could—there was a moment of opportunity where the movement had the wind at its back and there was a tendency (which proved disastrous) to be as ambitious as possible. Any accurate analysis has to start and end there.
…As so often, politics lies downstream from culture. Once we understand the cultural trends of a particular moment in time, the ruinous decisions of a small number of activists—who could have followed the consensus-building, coalition-expanding playbook of the gay rights movement but instead embraced extremism—begin to make sense.
The first thing to recognize is that trans rights was poised to become a major issue almost no matter what happened within a more narrowly political sphere. Trans visibility in popular culture and in online discourse had been steadily increasing throughout the 2000s andearly 2010s.
…Facile theories that pin the blame for the movement’s radicalization on a shift in resource allocation following Obergefell don’t fully explain the illiberal turn—most of the groups in this space had been decidedly liberal up to that point. But at this moment in the 2010s, social media pushed a more radical turn in the discourse all across the society. And dynamics within the trans movement itself broadened the definition of trans in a way that became purely political—and that had a pronounced radicalizing tendency.
…It’s not difficult to see why many found the view of trans as an identity to be affirmed less demeaning and more uplifting than viewing it as a disorder to be treated or a condition to be managed. In practice, however, this rejection of “gatekeeping” opened a Pandora’s box that dramatically expanded the trans community with an influx of people who were, for lack of a better term, politically trans.
…A tragic irony here is that this eschewal of medicalization did not stop activists from making youth gender medicine integral to their policy agenda