They won the gay equality fight by appealing to (old definition) liberal values and arguments. I don’t even mind that they won it, I care not what adults do to each other. But then they thought the next step was to convince people to abandon liberalism and replace it with their non-evidence-based Marxist ways of thinking, all this progressive stack, lived experience, sit quietly and listen white boy bullshit. You can do that if the “substrate” by which you try to push that stuff through is something most people already agree about: racism bad, women equal, let gay people be gay, maybe we weren’t very nice to the Indians, etc. That’s why it feels like they’re trying to rehash old battles, because they aren’t really so much trying to convince us that we’re racist (etc.) but using a divisive issue like race relations as a “substrate” to change HOW we think (or don’t think, I’d say is more accurate).

But they didn’t count on having to fight for trans acceptance or that trans/non-binary bullshit would suddenly become trendy. The problem with trans activism done through an illiberal lens or framework is that they never laid the foundation for trans acceptance through a liberal argument that most people could come to an agreement by. Unlike the other identity groups, there was no trans liberation before, argued for on lines of “don’t we deserve these rights you have” or “hey we’re just people too.” Instead, it’s all been illiberal arguments: do what we say or you’re LITERALLY KILLING US, gender is only ASSIGNED AT BIRTH, you don’t know until you get older… total bullshit claims they can’t prove with evidence (liberal method) so the have to just demand we accept them or else we need to be re-educated (illiberal method).

By demanding trans acceptance using an illiberal framework, they’re asking people to do two new things at once, not just one like CRT does, for example. Even people who think of themselves as being quite progressive in a slightly older sense (so pre-Trump announcing his run perhaps) don’t really buy all the trans, non-binary, faegender, they/them bullshit. So I suspect the establishment is pumping the brakes on that stuff just a bit, because if ordinary people start going “no, hang on, that’s a man in a skirt,” it’s easy for them to then ask, “and hey, why do you get to tell me what to think and yell at me if I have questions,” and then “and what do you mean, showing up on time is white supremacy,” etc etc and the whole damn thing comes unraveled.

This is all just one man’s hypothesis, but I think this is close to what they’re thinking. They need to pull back the reins on the trans thing and get illiberal systems of (non-) thought planted firmly in the Western conscious first, and then maybe after that’s done they can bring the trans along to acceptance, since a illiberal society will accept whatever you tell them to accept. They probably now wish they’d held off on the illiberalism for a decade so they could do the trans fight under the old rules, but entitled students at Evergreen and Yale opened the Marxist jar earlier than the Marxists might have liked (in retrospect), and so they have to make strategic decisions.