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Surely the type of anime plays some effect? I don't think that standard shonen battle animes like Dragonball, Demon Slayer, Naruto, etc. are making people trans, or encouraging them at all. But there's a particular subset of anime that really plays up the "girls are so cute!" schtick. And another, smaller niche that really delves into genderbending stuff in a way that most western media avoids.
I don't think we even know there's a correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism after controlling for the obvious confounder of autism (if you have evidence there is, I'm all ears). No point reaching for hypotheses to explain something until you know whether there's something to explain - especially not when you're thinking of reaching for a notorious false friend like the Jack Thompson argument.
This feels like one of those things where you're like "you got a source for that?" and i'm like "isn't it obvious? There's tons of examples all over the internet!" and you're like "yeah but none of those is an official peer-reviewed source (TM) so it doesn't count!" and the argument dies down into nit-picking.
This isn't about credentials. This is the third-variable problem: if A and B are correlated, then either A causes B, B causes A, or something else C causes both A and B.
I'm willing to take at face value that there's a correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism. But we already know that there is a third variable that causes both of these - autistics tend to like anime due to how our sensory processing works, and we tend to be susceptible to going trans although I'm not certain of why. (There's another obvious confounding third variable, now that I think about it; young people are more exposed to anime due to globalisation, and also are more exposed to pro-trans messaging due to greater Internet use and the rise of SJ.)
If the correlation is fully explained by causation from third variables, then there's no need to hunt for reasons A might cause B because it doesn't cause B. Folamh3's friend's noticed correlation was the preponderance of all four of teenage/autistic/anime/trans, which is totally consistent with "autism and youth tend to cause both anime-watching and transsexualism". If you have evidence that autism and youth do not fully explain the correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism, then yes, time to look for more complex explanations. Until then, there's nothing to explain.
(To give an example: Lung cancer is correlated with peripheral vascular disease. Neither causes the other. The correlation is because smoking causes both lung cancer and peripheral vascular disease, so an unusually-large fraction of the people with one are heavy smokers who are also at high risk of the other.)
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