The feeling I get from people back there who support these bonkers ideas, it’s like they are so desperate to distinguish themselves from that repressed, judgemental past, so eager to demonstrate that things have really, honestly, changed and that they aren’t like that any more, that they go far too far in the opposite direction.
I think there's also a sense of being adrift. If your culture was very tight wound and now it isn't, all the norms have gone. You know the old boundaries were wrong but it's not like there are new ones ready and waiting behind them in better places - boundaries are things cultures build. So now you are kind of looking to external voices to give you a perspective you don't have.
I also think with gender identity in particular, it's so illogical ...
("you know how there are men and women, right? Well, that's right, there are men and women, but it turns out it's not actually anything to do with what sex you are, it's actually this inner knowledge in your brain from hormones in the womb or something, and sometimes it turns up in the wrong body, and those people are really the other sex even though their body is a different sex, but they sort of always know because they like toys and clothes for the other sex even when they are very young, except sometimes they don't realise at all until they are quite old, especially men who are really women, and they've had these really macho lives and got married and had kids and stuff, to compensate I guess, but then they realise they were really lesbian women all along, and so the thing is it turns out that stuff like sexism, and MVAWG, and other horrible man things like flashing and perving and stuff, it's nothing to do with what body someone has, it's actually an inner man gender reacting to an inner woman gender, and so these people who we thought were men but are actually women, they shouldn't be in men's toilets or changing rooms after all, they should be with the other women because they have the same type of mind, and it might look like a penis but it's totally different because it's actually a woman's penis and if we hadn't been brainwashed into the gender binary we'd never even think to notice it, and the same for sports, it's all about what type of mind you have, and you can't say things like "women can have babies and that's a significant difference" because that's just reducing people to their bodies, and you shouldn't expect men and women to have a particular sex but if kids think they have the wrong body you have to give them hormones and surgery if they ask because otherwise their lives will be terrible and they will probably self harm or worse, and there's no one way to be trans and cis people can't know what trans people feel so if you ever question anything that trans people say trans is or cis is it's as bad as wishing they were dead because they've been suffering for so long so now we just have to be allies and believe them...")
...it's so illogical, yet being insisted with such authority by so many cultural and establishment bodies, that people simply have no confidence in their own judgement on this and so go along with what they are told by the "experts".
I mean, once you've accepted that the sex differences (physical and social) you can clearly see don't make any difference to our lives, but an inner gender no one can know unless a person tells them plays a huge role, how can you go on to make any rational conclusions from that? You are literally accepting you can't trust your own knowledge or observation in this matter. So, once you accept that, you are unavoidably tied into someone else telling you what's "right" based on this thing you yourself can't perceive.