Of course, back in the day, nobody actually believed 'transwomen are women'. They were men with issues, mostly to be pitied. they weren't imposing themselves on others, and you just ignored them, or treated them humanely, and let them go about their lives.

This. It worked out strangely that people more plugged into social justice issues were the first to notice the crazy trajectory and people who were a bit asleep at the wheel kept defending the TRA stuff. As soon as they started trying to claim trans X = X I started to question the ideology but it took a while before i realized how actually crazy so many of them were.