The person was clearly trying to say "it wasn't a big thing, and is huge now in comparison to just a few years ago". But hey, you won debate there with some counter examples that prove them wrong. But did we move the debate forward?
Me jumping in for everyone to understand the push-back and why the "data" you propose is not swaying our opinion. The reason something like a study isn't changing our minds about the topic is because we've seen how profit-making institutions, researchers, academia, and even the school system have all been "captured". The topic is taboo, and any sort of dissent is met with a huge amount of pushback, mockery, cancelling, "phobe" calling, and all manners of ugliness. The "literature" is then effectively rigged.
And even if the study is true, and valid, and there was no bias in the research conducted, because we've seen the above "capture" we can't reasonably convince ourselves to trust "the science". This is why it's so tragic that the left has gone scorched-earth with previously-trusted institutions. The trust and reasonable debate will take decades to be re-established, and until then we're stuck with this weird tribal "us vs them" hell hole.
"It wasn't a big thing" - how do you know? You do not. A group of people ask for a place at the table and you and your ilk question their legitimacy as human beings - that's what you're doing. People are saying "I feel this way, I am this way, I see others who feel like me and and feel empowered to come forward and live as the person I feel I am"
And your response is 'it's a phase' - like their identity is a fidget spinner. Nothing is being lost or endangered by making trans people feel welcome and valid and allowing them to pursue treatments that make them happier.
The topic is not taboo. What's taboo is invalidating the lives and existence of other human beings just finding a voice and a place in the world and figuring it out. After all if it's a phase, or a social contagion, it'll blow by and you can relax - but the amount of effort going in to making these people feel scrutinized and unwelcome doesn't seem like that's the point at all.
> "The topic is not taboo. What's taboo is invalidating the lives and existence of other human beings just finding a voice and a place in the world and figuring it out. After all if it's a phase, or a social contagion, it'll blow by and you can relax - but the amount of effort going in to making these people feel scrutinized and unwelcome doesn't seem like that's the point at all."
Every single person I know that isn't on-board with the Left or trans issues (someone the left would call a bigot and nazi), is 110% fine with actual real-world average trans people that want to just live their lives. What everyone has an issue with is the fact that trans activists have an obsession with "being allowed" in opposite-gender spaces such as toilets (like WTF, why?!?). They also have this weird obsession of wanting to have trans issues exposed, taught and presented to kids (again, why?). Also the whole thing about promoting, encouraging and allowing minors that can't consent to be transitioned and have their bodies effectively butchered (on this I will take a stand - this is a tragedy and history will judge those that participated). All of these have nothing to do with normal people questioning the "legitimacy" of trans individuals as humans, that's just been the catchy marketing hook presented by professional activists as they usurped the trans movement, so that they could polarize and perpetuate "The Movement" at the detriment to peace and harmony among all humans (whether they're trans or not).
The fact that the whole trans movement go co-opted by activists is sad, and causing real harm to trans individuals. Meanwhile, the rest of us, normal people, average people, have no desire to prevent trans individuals from being who they are or want to be.
There are people going back thousands of years which seem to fit pretty well under modern conceptions of trans people.
Even if you want to limit consideration to people who self-professed an identity under our modern conceptions, there's a full century of consistent examples. There was a thriving community of trans people in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, until it was rather abruptly cut off in 1933. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
