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Notes -
There's a gradient here between more and less gender-non-conforming (to be clear, I mean identified gender, not sex-assigned-at-birth; I am intentionally not using "trans" here because gender-non-conforming cis people are also affected). I expect that more gender-non-conforming people have always had trouble in gender-segregated spaces while only moderately/lesser gender-non-conforming people may have been more likely to go unnoticed. The recent culture war over the issue means some people are a lot more aware of looking for gender-non-conforming people and therefore noticing ones that are only slightly gender-non-conforming that would have gone unremarked on before.
The question is who made the first attempt to move the Chesterton's fence of what level of gender-non-conformance is acceptable in gender segregated spaces. I had pointed to the North Carolina bathroom bill, but there was apparently a year or so of lead-up involving the left winning court cases and making rules at various legal levels that that was in response to. Of course, with court cases, it can be difficult to determine the aggressor (e.g. was it an intentionally set up test case), but it looks like the left started it, not the right.
That's just like if a few high-profile heists make shopkeepers more alert and thus more likely to detect petty shoplifting though. Nobody's fundamental values have been changed.
That is, similarly to how there's never been a "Chesterton's fence" among shopkeepers declaring any amount of shoplifting acceptable (as opposed to simply too financially trivial and difficult to detect to be worth worrying about), I don't think there was ever any "Chesterton's fence" declaring any level of "gender-non-conformance" in regards to not belonging to the biological sex conventionally associated with a particular space acceptable. (Meaning I don't think there was ever any point at which people who objected to the more extreme cases of highly visible biological males in spaces generally reserved for biological females accepted the less visible ones, just that, like petty shoplifters, they weren't worth trying to detect because the overall general risk of having any biological male in such a space was seen as lower.)
So unless you deny people's rights to those values/boundaries, a positive service has been performed in increasing their vigilance in enforcing those values/boundaries.
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