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Notes -
I do agree it was more complicated than this in the moment, I was talking more about the long-term outcomes than the momentary tactics.
I do think that in that case it was more that the gay rights movement tried to win over the conservative movement by adopting their values and that worked, rather than vice-versa (although more detailed analysis is that it was more like a continuous feedback loop where more conformity led to more room for acceptance led to more conformity etc, and chicken-and-egg which one happened first on a micro-micro-scale).
But my point was more that there's a pattern here by which counter-culture outsiders get accepted and integrated into the herd and end up more traditionalist on a lot of metrics, and conservatives could be the ones to intentionally trigger that process this time if they wanted to.
I mean, sort of.
First of all, that took ~15 years from gay marriage starting be legalized to any real movement on trans issues. It's not like there will never be a cultural backlash to changes you make, that's not how any of this works, but buying a decade or two of buy-in for your project is a pretty massive victory by culture war standards (which are usually minute and fleeting).
Second, the gay rights movement 'moved on to' trans rights largely by evaporative cooling. Most of the gay rights movement evaporated after marriage rights and worker protections and etc were won, the current trans rights movement is much smaller than the gay rights movement was in its heyday and faces a lot more trepidation and mixed feelings from liberals, including plenty of gay people. In my mind that's why it's weak enough that people can talk about 'eradication' at national party conventions to wide applause and that's barely a scandal, why states can pass laws ranging from school censorship to restricting medical care and have that be a selling point for politicians rather than a scandal, etc.
I'm going to need to noodle on this a bit. When Obergefell hit, I quite literally celebrated with gay friends. I'm really not wed to the position that this was bad, and certainly not wed to the position that it was bad in and of itself. That said, I'm not immersed in queer politics to any meaningful extent and tend to associate the various strains of it and their role in progressive politics more broadly as something of a monolith, which probably isn't accurate. I find quite a bit of trans discourse, particularly about kids, to be appalling, inaccurate, and even self-evidently ridiculous in some cases. When I've had family members that I disagreed with gay marriage bust out the old, "I told you so" routine, I have basically shrugged and said, "yeah, you sure did, I guess I was wrong". I'll think about it more - thanks for the reply.
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"Smaller" means different things in an era of social media, combined with universal media approval. Fewer people, maybe. Less influence, no.
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