Freud identified cross-gender fetishism. Researchers starting in the 1950s developed a variety of classifications of transsexualism.
Gender Dysphoria was known as Gender Identity Disorder from 1980 to 2013. (The term 'disorder' was removed to avoid stigma). In 1982 the terms androphilia (sexual attraction to men)and gynephilia (sexual attraction to women) were added. Autogynephelia and Autoandrophilia were added in 2008.
What changed in the 2020s was not social media, hormone treatments, or surgery, but a push by those who stand to gain by promoting special rights for these pawns and to then use such rights to subjugate the rights of others, just as had been done in Weimar Germany.
Yes, of course such sexual fetishism has been around "forever."
But what the USA has done it turn a very small, almost unspoken about, socially-suppressed form of psychopathy - and turn it into a mass social and political movement, as (you point out) a form of street-agitation and red guard/brownshirt political force.