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Imagine you're out and about in the city, suddenly you hear a noise, you turn to see a truck heading right for you. Maybe you were too distracted, maybe the driver is drunk, either way you never had a chance.
Next thing you know, you wake up in a hospital, and the year is 2122. Turns out someone close to you signed you up to one of those cryonics experiments, where they unfreeze you when the state of medicine is advanced enough that they can help you. You grieve to loss of everyone you knew and loved, and given no other options, you move on with your life. You've made some friends, and one day as you're all chilling out, you find yourself in the middle of a discussion, reminiscent of the ones that happen on The Motte every once in a while: progressives always win... or do they? You hear your friends exchanging the usual arguments about whether or not eugenics was a progressive idea, when you realize you haven't really seen anything about trans issues, since you got revived. You bring it up, but no one knows what you're talking about. You check the current history books, and there's something about gay marriage, but nothing really about trans issues. You check Wikipedia, there's more details there, and while to coverage is not unsympathetic to the 21st century trans narrative, it's oddly terse. Your friends go "huh, the more you know..." and move on with the conversation, but you feel unsatisfied with being unable to show just how big the issue used to be.
There's a decent archive of the early 21st century. You can access articles in the NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox, etc, and you can retrieve any academic paper from our current era. What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?
The first step would be to figure out what happened and what's the status of the issue right now. What happens in 2122 when a dude wants to be a dudette or vice versa? What if a dude wants to bang other dudes while remaining a dude? Is everybody ok with this? Do they get arrested by the cyberpunk inquisition? Perhaps this never happens because those tendencies have been genetically engineered out of the population.
Your hypothetical doesn't explain this, but I think it would be important to know when planning out a culture war history lesson. (Or maybe deciding to shut up about the subject altogether, if it turns out that the cyberpunk inquisition is real.)
I can elaborate on the story, but I don't see how what exactly happened is relevant to how do you prove how big the topic is now.
All of that is allowed, it's just that transitioning is nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Some people still do it, it's seen the same way as cutting, or anorexia nowadays. There's no inquisition, and no evidence of mass scale genetic engineering. It's hard to find out what happened to change people's mind, because hardly anyone even knows about that episode in history.
Assuming that 100 years has not improved how well transitioning works and transitioning is no better than it is today, the current status as of 2122 still matters because much of the trans controversy is directly related to how you are required to act towards other people. Does 2122 think those requirements are still requirements? If yes, but nobody minds the requirements, the left won. If no, the left lost, and you can tell your friends "imagine that you had to use trans pronouns and let trans women onto women's sporting teams and..." Since your friends don't do those things, they should have no trouble understanding why forcing people to do them results in controversy.
Let me ask you this–if you were to walk into a bar and someone was wearing MC colors, how do you think society would require you to act toward them?
The question is whether my friends in 2122 would understand why it's controversial. If I said "you need to obey what the trans activists tell you or they beat you up", I'm pretty sure they would understand why that's controversial. Even if the things demanded by the trans activists were things nobody demanded in 2122, they would still understand it.
(Of course, the activists get you fired rather than literally bashing you over the head.)
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Like they were a potentially dangerous unleashed animal? Our society at least. But maybe in 100 years the panopticon is actually effective and you could be an unmitigated dick with no fear of consequences? Or maybe in a hundred years we will be celebrating the quinquagenary of our victory in the Sino American war, where motorcycle clubs provided the last line of defence against the invasion, and society expects you to treat them with deference and respect.
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