> Have you heard of Abigail Shrier's book "The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters"? She was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently though I have yet to listen to it. A quick search turned up, not surprisingly, some negative critiques and others that are more positive.
So, you're asking an honest question, but it's pretty insensitive and I hope you're curious because this is the truth. Framing that as a curious question makes me wonder if you even read the title of the book -- the title is quite obviously meant to be antagonizing to trans people. So that's not a great start. But here we go.
As for the contents of the book itself, it's little different from much trans-antagonistic pseudoscience and literature -- the main difference being that it's focused on guys rather than gals. It cherry-picks studies and anecdotes to promote harmful stereotypes, and presents trans-ness as a status symbol (it's not, it fucking sucks to be trans in the presence of cisgender people who know that).
To address the "craze", we need only look at history. I'll use mine. In the 1990s, when I was in middle school, I noticed distinct feelings that I now understand to be gender dysphoria. I didn't get it at the time; but sexual orientation was quite the buzz, and I knew I was bi very early on. In the 2010s, our society underwent a phase transition on its view of trans people. I met some other trans people, had some curious conversations, and started to put the pieces together. It took me several years to overcome my transphobic cultural upbringing; and several more to overrule the same of my ex-spouse. Coming out was hard. As with many, I lost friends and family to their prejudice. But even so, it's way easier now than it was in the 90s or even the 00s.
One commonality between trans and autistic people is that we don't always feel welcome around cis / allistic people. Not really knowing why, we form cliques of people who are feeling the same stuff. Many of the trans people I know are, yes, autistic, but also were outcasts as kids. In speaking with other late-transitioning people of my age, I've seen a pattern: others in our friends group have transitioned in the intervening years. Do groups of trans kids gravitate towards one another and have shared gender discoveries? Well duh, of course they do! It's not a "craze", it's a result of teenagers talking to eachother about their feelings, having appropriate language to talk about them, and having even the slimmest feeling of safety in coming out.