I am a Humanities academic, and perhaps I can shed a bit of light on this. I think for many of my colleagues who have wholeheartedly embraced this belief system, it comes from a place of care for students. They are the ones who would take up, officially or otherwise, roles like 'Student Support Officer', or volunteer for student induction events, or mentoring etc, and would vocally be 'student-centric' in terms of being approachable and kind and flexible etc. They would take on a lot of pastoral care of students, and so are a 'magnet' for students who need it, basically. The last decade has seen a 300% increase in students requesting disability support for mental health issues in my uni (not a typo), and a similar increase (though smaller numbers) of students who identify as trans or non-binary. Many of these colleagues see pronouns etc as caring for students in crisis - being kind, basically. And then, that becomes reinforced by university diversity and equality guidelines which emphasise the 'T' over pretty much everything else, because those guidelines are basically written by pressure groups who come in to 'advise' us.
Most of these colleagues are lovely people, feminist women for the most part, many of whom I count as my friends. But they don't see, or are kind of oblivious to, the ways in which the prioritisation of the 'T' impacts on other students - female students in particular, who - as Luftballoons points out - are not getting to properly engage with 'old-school' feminist theory, because it is problematic. One colleague recently commented that she couldn't use her own book in teaching anymore because she used so much 'problematic' French feminism in it, but expressed regret about it - somewhat secretly, and after a bit of wine - as she still believed quite strongly in that theory.
I no longer teach any feminist theory, and stay away from any 'representation of women' courses. You may say that is cowardly, and perhaps it is, but I had a very bad experience a few years ago when I was accused of being transphobic in a literary theory class for assigning an essay by Julia Kristeva, who is considered transphobic now because her theory is about the female body. My lack of pronouns in my Twitter bio was mentioned by a student in the discussion about the essay as 'harmful'.
BTW, I've changed username for this post, because based on my post history, it probably wouldn't be hard for someone so inclined to figure out who I am, and yes, I am worried that my career would be damaged if I was 'outed' as GC.