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I don't think this is something that will be changed through electoral politics. I suppose bans on transing minors are part of the spat, but it won't end through a legal ban. It's been pointed out that a lot of the this is driven by social contagion. The psychological mechanism behind deciding to transition is probably a lot more complex than a mere grift, but for a while it was patently obvious that transitioning is a quick way to get positive attention (and in some cases money). Unless they manage turn it into a literal religion, with trans people constantly built up and maintained as some kind of sacred caste, at some point people will just get bored, and move on to the next thing. When that happens it's over.
It will be interesting to see what happens if the only option remaining to get positive attention for people who transitioned, will be to loudly complain about being misled. That's probably enough to set off a domino of it's own, which is why there's such a strong cordon sanitaire around detransitioners among progressives. I'm with @OracleOutlook, probably they'll find a way to turn it around and blame it on conservative gender norms, or something.
But that's kind of the central issue here. Trans people are sacred insofar as Progressives are concerned, as they seek to prohibit speaking the blasphemies (as every other religious society tries to ban saying "God and the saints aren't real", and perhaps more relevantly here, debating the scientific merit of, uh, trans-substantiation).
Thing is, we already have a word to describe people who have their sex organ(s) removed (either they made it that way themselves, or were made that way by others), and everything beyond that (including the refusal to acknowledge that they're the same thing) is just tribal politics. It's taxonomically accurate for those who have the surgeries and the people in eunuch-advocacy organizations are obviously well aware of this- I doubt any given late-antiquity person would draw a distinction between eunuchs in their time and ours (aside from the fact that the "man" part of "castrated man" now refers to women as well) and so I don't either.
I think Progressivism as it is right now has too much "angry women trying to stick it to men" to survive a future where that is no longer a viable political strategy, and LGBT are neutral-at-worst to that goal (since, with respect to men, G is not interested in women by definition, B is not meaningfully distinguishable from G, and T are not only intensely effeminate but also infertile... hence not a threat either).
[Come to think of it, there might be something to say in here about "why so many effeminate men today" in the sense that effeminacy is a strategy to pull resources from elders being way more relatively powerful than that generation usually is for the same reason/along the same biological pathways it works for women in general, but that's out of scope for now.]
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The social contagioning tiktokers are, granted, not social conservatives, and when they vote they almost assuredly vote democrat, but they don't seem to be backed by democrats(you can usually tell when influencers have backing from the DNC. These guys aren't running get out the vote drives, after all). It's more like some influencers coming up with this stuff on their lonesome and then a bunch of abortion doctors offered them medical assistance for reasons, and this didn't really become associated with mainstream progressive politics until after it blew up.
So yes, I agree with you; the endpoint won't be political, and this stuff isn't driven by politics, it's driven by something else(I think declining mental health among liberal adolescents+fallout from the sexual revolution cannibalizing itself).
Yeah, I dont think this is literally sponsored by the DNC, but "all on their lonesome" sounds way too innocent to me. Granted, this is when I crack out the tinfoil, and start drawing charts explaining the structure of global conspiracies.
I agree that "all on their lonesome" sounds a bit innocent, but I really don't think mainstream progressive establishment types were backing this all along. My tinfoil hat tells me that the poster children wouldn't be mentally ill if they were(sure, liberal adolescent mental health is bad, but it's not that bad).
My best guess is that some progressive NGO got a grant for "helping gender minorities raise awareness through new media" or something, and so coached a trans-type on social media to exploit the algorithm before spending the rest on a conference in the bahamas, then it just became a fad.
I would blame the progressives for having standards which enable it. If you say no gatekeeping, if you try your best to keep parents out of the process, if you go out of your way to laud how trans people are brave strugglers against the outside world, if you make sure that anyone speaks up against the trans gets fired from their job, you're going to get a lot of social contagion trans, regardless of whether you're backing them explicitly.
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I think this is a really bad model of what motivates a lot of transitioners, especially younger ones. You're a lot more likely to see stuff redirect into enby or dissolve-the-gender-binary, in the unlikely case 'classical' gender transition gets depopularized. Far too much of modern culture is built around telling everyone to hate masculinity and women to fear their vulnerability in their femininity.
((That said, I recognize I'm a lot more sympathetic to trans stuff than the average person.))
Maybe, but enbyizm will only get you so far. You might get gimmicks like enby bathrooms in progressive spaces, but the trans issue crosses too many boundaries that people won't back down from. Enbies won't give you males in women prisons, sports, etc.,or Trans Women Are Women.
Some people pointed out that the whole trans thing is just a subculture like Goth, except it also involves permanent body modifications. Non-medicalized enbyizm will be literally just another subculture.
A lot of enbys medicalize to a extent I expect you or the median social conservative would not be comfortable with, and have for longer than enby has been well-recognized as a term. Literally today in my tumblr feed discourse for a ratsphere example. And while it would be a 'retreat' on some matters to some extent, I'm not sure it's as big a retreat as you'd think.
There's a tendency to round the more obnoxious nonbinary people into more standardized trans categories (including legal and statistical measures!), and to round the less obnoxious trans people into the nonbinary category, but there's a lot going on in those communities that isn't obvious to outside observers.
Well, I agree this would turn a victory into a hollow one, but I don't see that particular scenario working out. I think it's more likely I'm straightforwardly wrong, and the trans movement wins. "We were wrong about transing kids into men/women, but now we know better! The Science clearly shows we should have been turning them into Nullos instead!" feels way too out there.
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