Very perceptive, OP; I've been thinking much the same thing myself.

Teens and young adults are always looking for ways to shock their elders, right? But what happens when their elders are, well... pretty open-minded? Even comfortable with what used to be the counterculture? To the point that much typically countercultural stuff becomes... mainstream?

Because I think that's where we are now. Thanks to the aging of the Baby Boomers, and, perhaps even more, GenX (for whom the counterculture created by teenage/young adult Boomers was the stuff of early childhood). Now the "youth" have to contend with shocking their parents and grandparents who went to protests, were swingers, were punks, did drugs, got a million piercings and tattoos... who, honestly, might be a lot cooler than 16-year-old you.

But wait! They think that "gender" is a bunch of backwards bullshit! Something that they were determined to raise their own kids without! Encouraging their daughters to play sports and study science, their sons to play with dolls and show their emotions! No more pink is for girls/blue is for boys!

So... THAT'S how you shock them. With "gender". Making it the center of your life. Even to the point of mutilating yourself to conform to it.

I also think that, in terms of being-so-open-minded-that-your-brain-falls-out-ism, we've seen this movie before. When, in the 1960s and 1970s, the counterculture was ascendant, and the mainstream discredited. So you couldn't question any "revolutionary" idea that came down the pike. Such as... adults (well, men, really) "having sex" with children. Yeah, the western world's political left embraced that "cause", to a horrifying degree. Because if the traditional view was that sex = bad, then the enlightened, modern view must be that sex = good! In any and every form. The end.

We eventually got over that (largely due to leftist women), thank god... but it looks to me like "trans" is the new version. Both were packaged as individual freedom (children's rights! gender identity!) despite being anything but; both were taken up in the name of compassion and tolerance and progress. Hopefully, when people realize that "trans" is as beneficial to women, kids, and LGB people as its predecessor was to children, it will go the same way. Can't come soon enough for me.