Has anyone "followed the money"?

Excellent question.

Before she was banned by Medium, Sue Donym followed the money. She's republished her essay here.

Trans is worth big bucks. A quote from Forbes:

Trans-tech is a budding industry with an enormous opportunity, RKA claims. “Our estimates place the average cost of transition at $150,000 per person. Multiply that by an estimated population of 1.4 million transgender people, we’re taking about a market in excess of $200B. That is significant. That’s larger than the entire film industry.”

This study found that costs were significantly higher: typically around $40,000 a year, for the first five years, dropping to around $7-10K after that.

LGB organisations like Stonewall who had mostly won the culture wars were looking for a new reason to justify their existence (and their salaries). They weren't going to fight for LGB rights in places like Uganda or Saudi Arabia, and the trans billionaires were waving fistfuls of bucks around to legitimise transgenderism, so Stonewall and co jumped onto the trans bandwagon -- even though transsexuality is only ever-so tenuously associated with LGB issues, and the influx of straight male autogyn transwomen is directly opposed to LGB welfare.

Add to that the illiberal woke competing to signal who is the most virtuous in a purity spiral, and you get the mess we are in now where the rights of a handful of fetishist straight males LARPing as women outweigh the rights and safety of women and children.