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It's kind of ironic in a way. Conservatives have long argued that conservative organisations ought to be hypervigilant against entryism, to prevent themselves being subverted from within by bad actors or undercover enemies. Throughout history, organisations have come up with various countermeasures designed to prevent entryism e.g. gang tattoos (especially on the face) are an expensive signal that you're not a cop.
To the extent that those "trans people just trying to live their lives in peace" we keep hearing so much about are an organized faction, insisting on self-ID as the preferred standard for demarcating the trans from the cis was an incredibly short-sighted unforced error, as it left the group wide open to entryism by all manner of bad actors. "Anyone who says they're a member of this group is a member of this group, no questions asked" means no countermeasures against entryism at all. If the trans community hypothetically eventually came to be made up of "1 trans person trying to live their life in peace for every 99 perverts", the architects of self-ID will have no one but themselves to blame.
I find it impossible to consider it an unforced error. Not unlikely or improbable, impossible. Leaving aside the fact that this outcome was obvious to anyone with even an autist's grasp of social psychology, it was spelled out by advocates over a decade ago. Those advocates were called bigots and transphobes even if they were themselves trans - they simply became truscum. They knew what they were doing.
Mmm... no... It wasn't a coincidence, but- here's my model.
The queer community is made up of people who were rejected by society and decided to make their own society. Trans people are used to being gatekept by doctors and not allowed to get the procedures they want.
Their cultural norms are a reaction to their life experiences and that reaction is "gatekeeping=bad"
They call it "transphobic" because "you're just doing to them what everyone did to me!" is the most salient connection to them.
It's a reactionary overcorrection to gatekeeping. You can also model wanting kids to be allowed to transition the same way. It's a reactionary overreaction to gatekeeping.
('over'reaction insofar as it causes more problems than it solves. I do think society 50 years ago had too much gatekeeping on this issue. And personal grievances about having been gatekept too much remain valid. But there are tradeoffs at the societal level to consider.)
I'm sure that was the issue for some people, and as a nerd I sympathise. But the thing is, every trans person didn't overreact in that way, and of those who did not, practically 100% were the ones who had the professionally diagnosed medical condition the entire movement was built on. Kicking a bunch of gender dysphoric people out of the only support system they had as an overreaction to gatekeeping would be completely insane if the trans movement was about providing care and compassion for trans people. Less insane though, for a genuine community of sufferers co-opted by narcissists with a fetish.
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So you think the self-ID policy was dreamed up by the bad actors, and the good actors, somewhat reductantly, came along for the ride (at least for awhile)?
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