And it was basically never a problem until like last year or whatever. Like...transgenders have been around for decades, at least, I figure, and it was never made a big deal of until 2016, all of a sudden. When it's suddenly this epidemic that has to be dealt with somehow (outlandish things one way or the other).
Part of it is the LGBT+ movement, which has this feeling that the various group identities that are under it have all been marginalized somehow by society. Well, that's true of everyone! My belonging to certain groups that they consider higher in the "power structure" (white, male, heterosexual), doesn't mean I haven't been marginalized by society. That's something that happens at the earliest stages of childhood, when you first start to interact with other kids. you want to play tag or something, but the group wants to play hide and seek instead, and there's more of them then you, and you want to be in the group rather than alone, so you agree to play hide and seek. That's marginalization! Right there! Your own desires have been shifted to the side so you can better participate with the greater group.
This happens practically an innumerable amount of times in almost everyone's life. It's just a fact of living in a society. So now you have these groups in the larger LGBT+ community, and they think "oh, I'm getting marginalized! My group deserves to be in the name too!" That's why many include a "Q" at the end, for "queer" or "questioning" sexualities. Others include an "I" for intersex people. And so the most marginalized group gets recognized, gets added to the name, and then the second-most marginalized group thinks "We're being marginalized! We deserve a spot too!" And so you continue onward until you have an infinite number of groups and an infinite number of group emerge. From Wikipedia -
The initialism LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual) has also resulted, although such initialisms are sometimes criticized for being confusing and leaving some people out...
That kind of idea is part of the driving force behind all SJW actions - the idea that people have been marginalized, and we need to fix it by giving them extra exposure, or influence, or whatever. This is also the reason you see people who are supposedly speaking for various SJW groups, say something along the lines of "If you're a white person/man/straight, you should step back and let others with less privilege (AKA more marginalized people than you) speak instead of speaking yourself." What I feel they don't realize is that marginalization is necessary for human society to even function.
I may have gone off on a tangent there, but hopefully you can parse at least a little information out of all that.
I think that's the point; they keep finding more and more edge cases to get worked up over and try forcing the entire population to comply with the latest SJW trends.
Ding ding ding! Only reason it became an issue close to the end of the election. Obviously the conservatives would be against it, right? Gives the progressives yet another -ism or -phobic to use.
It actually kind of backfired though, at least a little bit. I watch or listen to Tucker Carlson most nights for entertainment, and he has had multiple self-identified "radical feminists" on his show in the last few weeks to discuss how identity politics are harming women and girls and their rights as women, "minorities" in fields or just their identity as being female...and he never attacks them and goes with "radical feminists and conservatives actually agree on this issue".
Kind of brilliant for him to reach out to them to try and get RadFems to agree with the conservative side.
I still don't understand how such a rare edge case could be turned into such a vital issue during the presidential campaign.