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It goes deeper than that. It all started with the socialist movement. That had the same sort of goal- radically change the culture of society by convincing people to voluntarily join them. And it made more sense, at least politically- get the 99% of workers to join up and take the wealth from the 1% of rich capital owners. Should be easy to win that vote in a democracy right? Except that the 1% weren't stupid, so they sent in strikebreakers and police to break up the labor movement. And the workers weren't stupid either, so most of them didn't want to risk joining this radical revolutionary movement to overturn society, especially when most of them were too uneducated to understand wtf the socialists were saying.
So the socialist leaders hit on a new tactic. Start with students and intellectuals at universities, who can be easily persuaded by radical arguments and are relatively free from police oversight. From there, you create a revolutiony vanguard, which can be used to gradually take over all the key institutions of society. Then you enact all the reforms you want, and the people can then be re-educated to appreciate the good you've done, without putting it to a vote, since a fair vote would never be allowed by the capitalist elites.
(edit- I wrote "socialist" in this post, when it probably should have been communist. For me as a modern day American those terms are pretty much interchangeable, but I think to the leftists of the past there was a huge split between the two groups, and it was really the communists pushing the radical left, while they saw the democratic socialists as squishy sellouts to capitalism)
For women it's a bit harder, since they only make up 50% of the population, but the basic idea is the same. Racial and sexual groups at ~10% might seem even harder, but it's still the same process. You don't put it to an election because "human rights are too important to be voted on," and because you'd lose. Instead, first identify an oppressed group, then create an intellectual movement to save them, then push your intellectual group through the elite institutions until you have power without an open election. You'll be proven correct in retrospect, as civil rights, women's rights, and gay marriage are now broadly popular even though they weren't when they were first instituted.
Trans is the latest and most extreme, since they're only like 1% of the population. But I guess it doesn't matter. If anything, to a certain sort of intellectual, that makes the moral crusade even more appealing. And all of these groups share a similar worldview that their ultimate goals can only truly be accomplished by ending capitalism.
This seems to be a common framing, but I generally disagree, as I think it elides the actual dynamics at play.
Perhaps your description is somewhat exaggerated or simplified for effect, but describing the process as one where socialist leaders are masterminding a strategy to take over universities and then society implies a very high degree of coordination that I just don't see. Who are these leaders? Where do they meet? What's their organisational structure? How do they retain such cohesion over decades?
You can certainly find examples of academics talking about this idea, and I'm sure everyone is familiar by now with the infamous "Long march through the institutions" quote, but that's not how culture works. Culture changes institutions, but there's a huge gap between recognising this obvious fact and having a small group of people able to push coherent and sustained radical cultural change over long time scales.
I view the cause and effect as almost completed reverse. Culture changes first, driven in my view by structural changes in society, which prompts people to jump on board. This doesn't happen all at once or in the same way for all segments of society, as there are different structural forces at play depending on your demographics.
I suspect you may be drawing this view from the United States, where there has been a lot more judicial activism on these issues, but is simply inaccurate for most countries that have enacted the changes you're talking about. Gay marriage is a recent example - in every European country I can think of, it was legislated following public debate (sometimes following explicit election commitments), and often with concessions such as the use of conscious votes not typically allowed by political parties. The only exceptions are places like Ireland, where they enacted it via a referendum.
There's no need for current leaders to meet and mastermind a strategy, because that work has already been done. They met in Moscow in 1919 at the Third International, where they agreed on the basic strategy- only the radical left is allowed (no moderates), constant revolution, cooperate internationally, and use whatever force is necessary to win. This was the end result of a long process starting with the First International in 1864 London, and other groups before that.
College students come in at age 18 and get exposed to this stuff for the first time. They think "wow, what fresh new ideas! I want to be a revolutionary leader too!" But they're not leaders at all, they're just the latest foot soldier for a very old movement where the leaders are long since dead. Nonetheless, it continues because it works. It's like "terrorism" or "guerilla warfare"- you don't need a living general to teach those strategies. But you do need sergeants and lieutenants to teach the new recruits in the basics.
Gay marriage might be an exception since it is broadly popular, at least since after the US enacted it. But what about other woke/leftist cultural programs? Immigration for example seems extremely unpopular, and yet all the European governments keep increasing it anyway.
I suppose the main way I view this differently is that I don't see the masterminding of a strategy / the Third International etc. as being necessary at all. If I imagine two possible worlds:
I really don't see much difference in outcome (in which case scenario two would win as it involves less complexity). Part of the reason I think this is because it has been quite a gradual development, happening over multiple decades, which seems more plausible to me as driven bottom-up rather than top-down.
I guess what I'm saying is, what makes you say that what we see today is the result of masterminding by socialist leaders, rather than the result of an emergent shift in the culture? There was certainly a fair amount of propaganda coming from the USSR, as well as Western apologists, but is the idea that there was more than this? The idea of a counter-culture forming in academia seems fairly unremarkable to me, as does the idea that it would attach onto socialist ideas given the existence of the USSR, but I am open to being shown clearer links between the two.
If I had to speculate, I'd put the changes down to the institutionalisation of science and academia post WWII. A model of government funding by committee allows for the emergence of fields that are uncorrelated with either reality or the broader community, and if there's funding to be had academics will be drawn there.
I wanted to point out that not all cultural programs arise from the same source, and gay marriage seemed like a good example of that. From my experience the debate generally came before the dominance of 'wokeness', and the more radical leftists were not supportive - in my experience the Marxists and socialists regarded marriage as a patriarchal, heteronormative and capitalist institution that perpetuated the status quo, while queerness offered a way of destabilising that. The argument for gay marriage was driven by liberal (in the John Stuart Mill sense) and even to some degree conservative concerns, which I think accounts for its general acceptance.
Immigration is an interesting one, and there are quite a few facets to it. I follow the UK more closely than the rest of Europe, and it's worth noting that there have been very high rates of immigration under both the conservative and now the labour governments. It's known to be a major issue for the electorate, and governments have repeatedly promised to reduce the intake, so as you say why do they keep increasing it anyway? Here the answer is almost certainly economics - since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, most European countries (and Australia) have had essentially flat GDP per capita growth (see e.g. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=US-AU-GB-FR), so the only way to keep the economy growing is to import more people. This is not a good long term strategy, but a sharp cut to the immigration intake would result in recession, which are infamously unkind to the electoral prospects of governments. (A Home Secretary in the previous conservative government in the UK, Suella Braverman, has talked about this, and recounted being shut down by Treasury in Cabinet when trying to discuss reducing the immigration intake consistent with the government's election promises).
The US of course has different drivers, as the economic situation is quite different (though there would still be a strong demand amongst certain groups for low-wage workers). Media and the general attitudes of people in the PMC will have different drivers again, and here cultural explanations make more sense. I won't expound on these as I think the discussion of them is fairly widespread.
I've read documents from/describing the Communist Party of Finland in the 1960s, when a lot of academics entered it (for the first time in basically, well, ever), and the general feeling was that while they welcomed the influx they were also quite suspicious of the new recruits and constantly worried that this would eventually draw the party away from the working-class base (the fears were correct, as it turns out to be). The specific strategy of orthodox Marxism has always been based specifically organizing the working class as working class.
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