No, there's been a rise of acceptance of the attitudes to be identified as something else. It just happens to be that anime is popular, the western world has gotten a lot more accepting and less judgemental of diverse ideas and hobbies (and that empowers the ill-educated and bias people to explore ideas and accept them and express them without scrutiny). It just looks like anime has inspired a bunch of people to be trans, if people weren't so accepting of "weirdoes" this wouldn't happen and by your logic, Japanese female and male cultural attitudes towards gender and sexuality should be more "progressive" than the west and we should be seeing more males in Japan identifying and campaigning for trans rights much earlier than the west considering the Yaoi and Hentai they consume is for them. For them to be obsessive and crazy in the first place, they've got to have that type of personality and anime just happens to be their favourite. Yaoi and Hentai has always been popular so there's no "rise", it's always been there and always been extremely depraved or incorporated into more innocent genres (e.g. Kyou Kara Maou) way before the trans movement and that's during the golden age of pirating anime series on the internet (before legal stream sites and many years before the massive purge of content). I never said it was exclusive to males.

Edit: Wording