The mental model you guys are working off of is completely wrong.

Not much direct research has been done, but the impression I get is that a surprising amount of the post-2016 right aren't lifelong Christians (or even Christians at all even now, belonging to factions such as libertarianism which isn't tied to religion at all), and aren't even lifelong conservatives. A lot of them vocally supported Obama in 2008 if they're that old. the support for gay marriage among Republicans has approached 50%, which is a massive increase over the previous support near 20%. Moreover, you may be surprised to find that not everyone who is concerned about what's going on is a conservative or a republican either. Protecting children from people who hope to cause them harm is a universal human value, and likely is derived from instincts far before that.

It's really important to understand the recent history of conservatism, because it's a rapidly changing landscape. On one hand, you have traditional liberals who are now considered conservative for not rushing headlong enough into the latest thing, and on the other hand you have openly far right factions and they aren't hiding their open contempt for other factions for not being extreme enough, and they aren't hiding their opinions on things like women, black people, and jews. In that respect, I see a lot of people working off a playbook that's out of date and coming to wildly wrong conclusions on a wide variety of topics from that false model. After the Republicans got crushed in 2008 they had to go back to the chalkboard and find new strategies that would work in a new world. People made fun of some of the attempts such as the tea party, but that resulted in a lot of new ideas and new blood coming into the party. Many other conservative parties around the world needed to do the same thing because they faced similar defeats. As a result, around the world parties that were considered completely outside the overton window for being conservative are gaining ground. AFD in Germany, Fratelli d'Italia in Italy, and even the far right populist PPC got more votes than the green party in Canada in the recent election, and in the next election the Conservatives are on track to win a massive majority. This isn't happening because they're telling the same stories they were 15 years ago, it's happening because they're finding new stories to tell while their left-wing opponents are just quadrupling down on the stories they told 15 years ago that don't represent a reality in 2024. Conservatism isn't just Christianity therefore, it's a much flatter, much wider thing including a lot of the cultural consensus from 15 years ago and a lot of stuff that would be considered literally unspeakable 15 years ago.

If you want to blame someone for making people think they're trying to make kids gay or trans, you should probably blame all the idiots who were recorded saying they wanted to make kids gay or trans. You should blame people who use the phrase "not so secret gay agenda" positively in describing what they're doing in their work on kids shows. You should blame the people who put out musical numbers singing "We'll convert your children!". As well, you should blame the people who have decided that starting to transition children in schools while explicitly keeping it secret from parents is a hill they want to die on. In some of the cases I'm referring to they claim to be just joking, but it is the contemporary left that drew the line in the sand that if you joke about anything you're advocating for the most extreme thing you can imagine with respect to that thing. If you care deeply about your kids, and someone is "joking" about doing something you find unspeakable to your kids, why take a chance and why not just believe them?

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was something called the "Satanic Panic". The police questioned kids about certain things and eventually they got stories from these kids that led to the arrest of dozens of people. The problem at that time is it was all false. One kid claimed the cultists killed and ate and forced him to eat his friend (who was very much alive). Police scoured airports looking for airplanes that could land secretly in a residential neighborhood, fly a child to mexico to be molested, then returned to the same neighborhood in the same day. Another kid spoke of a complex series of tunnels under a town that the cultists used for their satanic rituals, and when it was checked there were no tunnels. In the end, it turned out that all the people accused ended up being innocent, and what we learned from that is that we need to be very careful when trying to figure stuff out from kids because they want to tell us things we want to hear. Today there's a completely different method of questioning children in criminal cases exactly because we know kids are impressionable and we need to be careful about finding the truth and not just the answers that are convenient to us. In the same way, to be responsible we need to be extremely careful about giving kids drugs or surgery that permanently modify the path of their bodies solely because they tell us they are something.

Compare the way "trans kids" are being treated by politicans and the media, and even if you assume good faith and that it isn't intentional, it's impossible to see the behavior as anything but manipulative and dangerous from a completely secular viewpoint. Telling kids that if they assume a certain characteristics that they're so loved and so wanted and so supported and they're being mistreated by everyone around them that just doesn't know how special they are and giving the same message all the time -- of course a bunch of kids will go "oh, well if that's what the important adults want me to be then that's what I'll be".

Now, one important piece of the puzzle with respect to "trans kids" is that someone who questions their sexuality isn't going to ask anyone to surgically alter their bodies, which would be why that piece of the puzzle is particularly contentious.

Different studies of kids trans kids showed that between 60 and over 90% of kids who expressed confusion about their gender identity ended up the gender identity of their birth after 18 without treatment. If nothing else, that should raise serious questions about whether treatment of any kind before the age of 18 is ethical, considering you could potentially end up causing needless harm to 9 kids for every 1 kid you help. There is certainly a lot of research disputing these findings, and in fact the number of articles saying "nuh uh" absolutely dwarfs the actual claims, but as a politically charged issue there's an obvious concern about politically induced bias here, which makes me want to believe the older studies from before this was such a front and center topic. You can disagree, but I'm sure my skepticism of "new study shows everything political movement claims is true" is not so unreasonable. If I'm not going to believe creationists when they spit out a flood of studies 'proving' the world is only 8000 years old, why would I believe trans youth ideologues when they spit out a flood of studies seemingly solely in response to being challenged politically?

There has been an explosion in the number of kids identifying as trans. Now, it could be that we're just living in the gayest, transest time in the history of the world, but when we're dealing with numbers increasing by many orders of magnitude, it's equally possible that there's an element of social contaigen. Some people might claim that social contaigen is absurd and wouldn't cause people to do something as extreme as this. The thing is, it is uncontroversial that there is an element of social contaigen in cutting, anorexia and suicide which are both purely harmful, and recreational drug use which can be quite harmful.

Given the basis of the Hippocratic oath, medicine should be politically Conservative but practically conservative and be very careful about implementing new treatments, particularly on a very large scale, particularly when the effects of those treatments are so overwhelmingly dire. Fundamentally modifying and fundamentally damaging sex organs and primary and secondary sexual characteristics is something we have to be very careful about doing and nobody should be jumping for joy at the idea that it's something that we have to do, in the same way that no one should be jumping for joy at the idea that they should need an organ transplant.

Another important thing to remember is that there is a solid history in the 20th century of medical ideologies or technologies that become wildly popular and end up proving to be somewhat evil. Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canadian healthcare, was a vocal proponent of eugenics. The prefrontal lobotomy eventually ended up coming to be considered an example of barbarism but when it was first invented was considered a miracle cure. Prior to the 20th century, cocaine was considered so fantastic that Sigmund Freud himself wrote a book called on cocaine which was about how much he thought cocaine was a beneficial drug. All of these are cautionary tales about simply accepting the current orthodoxy on a current medical treatment.

You'll note that none of these are religious arguments. You don't need to believe in any God to look at the above. You can be a hard atheist and look at the facts above and be concerned because you don't want people hurting your kids for their political ideology. If you think that it's solely due to christianity that someone would look at the above and be concerned then you're fundamentally misunderstanding people around you.

Now to give everything a broad view, just because something ends up being bad in the way that it's implemented doesn't necessarily mean that it is entirely bad. Eugenics taken to it it's extremes horrible and immoral, but some individuals with major genetic diseases choose independently not to have kids because of the risks involved. Prefrontal lobotomies as a carry-all for anything that could heal you is obviously absolutely horrific and terrible, but it is still very occasionally used for very specific situations. I believe that even cocaine has legitimate medical applications, and if it doesn't then certainly it's cousin opiates or something that are quite dangerous and should not be thrown around thoughtlessly but have incredible levels of therapeutic benefit. I would even go so far as to say that there may be situations where very early intervention in transgender cases could be tremendously beneficial, but I think that the data is clearly showing you have to be very careful and being a political topic the way it is I don't think it's being treated very carefully.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/

[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Pivot_Counties:_The_counties_that_voted_Obama-Obama-Trump_from_2008-2016

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/des-moines-public-schools-teacher-targeted-after-joking-of-forcing-students-to-be-gay/ar-AA1jU8Nt

[4] https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/03/30/disney-executives-admit-they-are-pushing-not-at-all-secret-gay-agenda-actively-removing-gendered-greetings-and-a-whole-lot-more/

[5] https://www.tmz.com/2021/07/09/san-francisco-gay-mens-chorus-convert-your-children-controversial-song-backlash-death-threats/

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/satanic-panic.html

[9] https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/06/23/satanic-panic/

[10] https://twitter.com/theJagmeetSingh/status/1753190259343708432

[11] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/you-are-loved-white-house-press-secretary-tells-lgbtq-youth-2023-04-06/

[12] http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html

[13] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/

[14] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/958742?form=fpf

[15] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/

[16] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867413502092

[17] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23387399/

[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3926100/

[19] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/hippocratic-oath-today/

[20] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/tommy-douglas-and-eugenics

[21] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-55854145

[22] https://www.vice.com/en/article/payngv/how-cocaine-influenced-the-work-of-sigmund-freud