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I think it's important to still care about convincing the other side, because it's useful. We live in a democracy, therefore more public support for our side increases our chances of successfully implementing it. If we lived in a dictatorship with you or I in charge and could just ban it immediately, then authoritarian suppression would be the way to go to guarantee it stops as soon as possible.
If, in the current environment, everyone on the right gives up on persuasion and just decries their opponents as inhuman monsters then all of the areas controlled by the right will ban it, all of the areas controlled by the left will not, and everyone in the center will see one side pretending to be kind and compassionate while we superficially look like authoritarian bigots despite being the ones actually helping people.
In general, the right has a huge optics problem. Or rather, the left has an optics advantage because the majority of their positions are chosen based on optimizing for feelgoods and superficial appearances, which makes them look better than they are in practice. The only way the right (and moderates, and logical people who don't optimize exclusively for optics) can stand a chance is by being logical, persuasive, and thorough enough that the superficial appearances are stripped away and the actual superior policies are revealed to the people around.
Gender affirming care for minors is an evil policy with horrible results. Most people who support it from a distance aren't evil people, they're naive people who haven't actually looked into the details and have just bought into the propaganda that all anti-trans arguments are founded on bigotry and hatred. And you don't change their minds by acting the same way someone who irrationally hated trans people would act, if you try then they'll stop looking further as soon as you confirm their prior beliefs. You change their minds by being kind, compassionate, logical, explaining this in detail, and then banning child mutilation because it's the kind, compassionate, and logical thing to do.
Do you know of any historical instances in which this kind of behavior bore fruit?
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I feel like being kind and compassionate works better with IRL acquaintances. Although IME they too have a persistent habit of just turning off their brains the moment the arguments get more detailed than anything they've gleamed from an activist's TikTok video.
But in the public sphere, there is observable value in being mean. The Left has been really good at employing mockery and mean-spiritedness to their own ends. It makes hay for the true believers, and cows fence-sitters into snapping into the cool, trendy orthodoxy of the day out of fear of being embarrassed. When I was a younger man on the Left, it was a popular sentiment that to really destroy bad ideas, you had to ruthlessly mock and ridicule them (with facts and reason on our side, but of course!).
Admittedly, I don't think this breaks any cycles. Grudges will be held, vengeance may be enacted further down the line. It's not lost on me that that much of the progressive zeitgeist is a reaction to some conservative Christian status quo ante. This ain't exactly stable.
But maybe being an uncompromising, loudmouth fucker is the only way you stay in the fight.
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