To claim there are not really any other candidates for a skew (in that direction or the other) you would have to (like Shrier herself) go out of your way to not bother to talk to trans people, or their doctors, or their families, or sociologists, or talk to any of the people who spend their lives researching gender, what it means, how it affects us, what assumptions we make, whether those ideas stack up when confronted with empirical research, etc etc. I'm not really interested in discussing further with a 30 minute old account.
Increasing social acceptibility and awareness is not mysterious to people who understand that many perceptions about gender are constructions that occur in social contexts.
Why do I owe you any specific "explanation" when the context here is that you are treating Shrier's pseudoscientific book that literally tells parents in the closing chapters that if their kid has a trans friend they should consider moving cities to get their child away from their trans friend as though we are supposed to take transphobic hate literature at face value.
Maybe a better step than me agreeing to do that is that instead you should take the entire corpus of medical literature on the subject, as well as the voices of trans people on the subject of trans people at face value first.
The statistical evidence for a change in the paper you linked and the other papers in the area is extremely weak.
At one end of the scale is very little data that gives an unreliable picture with a high degree of variability, at the other end of the not very long in time scale is somewhat more data that provides a better picture.
To make such a fuss about " this demographic change " indicates a lack of exposure to such statistics.
Why are you attempting to make such a big deal of bad data here?
I'm indifferent to the social issues here, I care about the <gasp> statistics presented.
With the linked and peer reports there's a short time span, limited populations, and a run of yearly statistics that start with very few numbers and end up with less than 2,000.
The initial numbers make the guesstimation of an inital demographic ratio extremely dodgy - it's not sound.
Despite this there's been someone with .. an idealogy(?) .. making numerous comments about "Look at the demographic shift, eh", "What's that all about", "nudge nudge".
The dull numerial reality is there's no strong evidence for a shift .. if anything it's more a "time and increasing sample sizes make for a clearer picture".
Maybe just think critically, without conspiracy about it for two seconds. With anything else, I'm sure you'd see the classic survivorship bias error you are making here.
