If you are opposed to swinging penises in the young girls locker room you are a hater. The New York Times is at war with teenage girls.
I think you are right. In fact, I have come to think that transgender activism is incidental to this campaign, simply a convenient wedge for pressing other agendas.
From a forensic standpoint, the fascinating thing is how rapidly mixed-sex bathrooms and school locker rooms have become iron-clad, hysterically defended dogma on the left. Suggest that people with penises don't belong in girls' locker rooms, and that girls have a privacy right at stake, and suddenly you are a bigot, end of argument. This has happened virtually overnight. The same thing happened on gay marriage, of course; one day, it was "we just want the same rights everyone else has, and no more," and two days later, the thought police are out tracking down anyone who declines to join the celebration, and driving them from the public square.
That said, as a practical matter, the number of transgendered people is vanishingly small, and the number of transgendered people who want to create a ruckus over it, I suspect, is a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction. Left to themselves, I do not think middle school, high school, and college age transgenders, or their parents, would press the issue with this ferocity. I think the push is coming from the radical gender warriors who want to eradicate all social and legal distinctions between the sexes. Using the transgender issue to get penis people into girls' locker rooms and rest rooms is a next step, but not the last step by any means. It is an assault on the right to privacy and a perfectly conscious effort to undermine any vestige of sexual modesty. The radicals want middle and high school boys and girls showering together. They want a promiscuous culture, the earlier the better, and believe that institutionalized nudity contributes to it. They like the idea of teenage girls getting used to having naked boys around; it will soften them up before college, although the boys will still be under the microscope lest they slip up and show any overt interest without prior written consent.
I'm probably not putting this very well, but those of us of an age will remember Herbert Marcuse's call for "polymorphous perversity" and the deliberate promiscuity of the New Left, which was ideologically driven in an effort to "smash patriarchy" and destroy the nuclear family. These goals are very much in play. The vanguard of the gender warriors on the left want boys and girls showering together. Most of them won't admit it publicly, and none of the democratic politicians will, but that is where the direction, energy, and intensity are coming from. And as on so many other issues, no one in the mainstream of the democratic party or the leftist media has the backbone to stand up against the lunatic fringe that is driving the bus.
I will guess that very few of the vanishingly few 15 year old boys who identify with the girls want to cause the girls any distress. After all, they want to be friends with them, not nuisances or embarrassments. Most of them, left to themselves, will go out of their way to respect the girls' privacy. They will use the boys' facilities as they've always done. Or they will wait until the girls' restroom is clear. Or they will use a single seat bathroom and lock the door. Or they will shower after everyone else, or wait until they get home. But the activists are pushing the issue for other reasons, and using the sexually confused kids as cannon fodder.