Thank you for this discussion - some very thought provoking answers here. I have often thought that there are strong similarities to the witch craze in the early modern period , including the desperate backdating of the belief in a satanic witch cult by ‘believers’. A few scattered historical examples of witches, who were mainly dispensers of love potions and poisons, who might offer prophesies and personal fortune telling were pressed into the service of a sort of black mirror of Christianity. The difference, of course, that the few who actually claimed to be witches and were prepared to pay the penalty were enormously outnumbered by those who feared, persecuted, and attempted to eradicate them.
The trans movement on the other hand is sought out, protected and given special consideration and unusual privileges. If a man enters and wins a female sporting event, he is disqualified and possibly penalised, if he was allowed to compete at all. If a male bodied person who identifies as female does the same thing, ‘stunning, brave and gifted’. If a bearded man with male genitalia hangs around in spaces where female undress, he is stigmatised and ejected. If a person with a penis who still grows a beard identifies as female, the women who object to his presence are stigmatised and ejected.
So the frenzy and apparent contagion are similar, but the participation is rather different.
the frenzy of the Terror during the French Revolution is another example of apparently intelligent and well intentioned people losing sight of reality and probability , and eventually guillotining themselves to a standstill. Is the Cultural Revolution a similar phenomenon.
I think the idea of being in fashion and wanting to be ‘special’ also resonates. The ‘queer’ couples who appear to the uninitiated to be a bloke and a women in a heterosexual relationship give themselves a thrill by using names usually associated with the opposite sex, maybe changing a few garments around. Harmless fun, and wins approval from the desperately broad minded.
Perhaps there is also an element of ‘because we can’ ? In spite of the rewriting of history ( Joan of Arc introduced herself and called herself La Pucelle, which means young unmarried girl, no confusion or deception there), until the invention of synthetic hormones , it was not possible to fool the body into producing at least a simulacrum of the secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex : beards and breasts. Of course it was always possible to remove breasts and genitalia, although the casualty rate was very high. Such removal was usually seen as a punishment , of course, or at the best, a cynical mutilation to achieve a practical advantage for someone else( the servants in the harem, the male sopranos).
And then the whole thing has been muddled by some people who see monetary , social, or sexual advantage in fostering the movement, and are preying on the unhappy, the unsettled or the unwell.