Trans academia is wild. I spent a couple of hours reading abstracts some days ago, after someone had posted a link to the Journal of Lesbian Studies. One of the speakers at this event, Marquis Bey, (who is black and maybe trans?) seems to be doing their best at conflating the experience of being black with being trans in an article in Transgender Studies Quarterly (because even though they've colonized every other LGB journal, they still needed their own.)

From the abstract: "Manifesting in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity, black and trans, though pointed at by bodies that identify as black or trans, precede and provide the foundational condition for those fugitive identificatory demarcations. The author seeks to demonstrate the ways in which trans* is black and black is trans*."

So the idea that trans women and black women are both 'a different type of woman' doesn't seem to be a fringe belief, but a legitimate subject for an essay.

About this event, if they seriously can't answer this question. "Why have trans lives and identities become a politically potent rallying cry for people who seem not to care very much for trans people?" then I'm not sure a webinar will save them. They do know the answer of course, but it's appearently beneath them to consider the actual material reality of males in women's spaces, instead of 'gender fugitivity' and bodies-as-construct or whatever.