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Notes -
I think you put a bit too much stock into the TSE thing. A good number of people online are Just Like That, you don't need to psyop them. I don't deny that there is a social contagion element to it ("Nerd communities devastated by HRT", etc.), but it's not the only thing that originally attracted people to trans-adjacent stuff. MtF TSE got off the ground because there were initially people who created the ecosystem – they did not want to be men, fulfill the male role or abide by the male social engagement etiquette, so they went and created pleasant spaces with norms of support and positivity, sort of "LARP as a woman you want to see in the world" clubs, where weirdos could be free from those male social codes, which later attracted others who also wanted in on that, as those were much nicer than default male-coded spaces, at least to a certain type of person, and eventually the whole thing reached escape velocity and TSE we know and are ambivalent about emerged, although not without many twists and turns that changed the original idea.
To illustrate with a bit of personal history, way back in the day I started hanging out in a few chatrooms full of people who mostly went by female nicknames and addressed themselves as female online, while being unmistakably male offline and not really denying that fact. This was in the early 2010s, in the non-English-speaking parts of the internet, long before TSE was a thing. Some of them came from MMOs, some from imageboards, others from different internet places still. Yet these people had similarities – most of them were autistic, heavily into anime, extremely online and probably experienced some degree of AGP. They didn't like or fit in with male social norms and culture of the time (despite ostensibly being mediocre men, whom the culture revolved around), so each LARPed as an anime girl archetype they enjoyed. They wanted to act cutesy, ditzy, haughty, flirty, et cetera, whatever is the opposite of the standard male MO. Color is a good way to describe it, the regulars indeed wanted to be colorful and emotionally expressive rather than stable and stoic. They didn't act like real women, but they acted out idealized female stereotypes instead. It wasn't a political thing, and politics would rarely be discussed, certainly not identity politics. Most everyone tried their best to act how their ideal of themselves as a woman would act, because they enjoyed it, and that's who they wanted to embody. Those were very nice places to be part of, certainly much nicer than the current trans-adjacent spaces. I believe all of the regulars there would press the button with zero hesitation, and not because some nefarious TSE made them do it.
(I've kept contact with many of them since, half of these individuals have transitioned, and if we were in the US, the number would probably be closer to 80%)
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