Indeed, the idea that some "ideology" is causing all this "trans stuff" (which Francis, btw, has called "annihilation of nature" in more than one forcefully written jeremiad) is just tail-chasing incoherence.

You couldn't get a small roomful of queer people to agree on ideology if your life depended on it. That's as true today is it was back when I was a member of Act Up and our lives literally depended on getting along and doing activism together. We managed it by agreeing not to agree on ideology.

Gender-variant people exist commonly across cultures and as far back into human existence as we're able to peer. Ideology plays little or no role in observing that a very small percentage of humans consistently experience a disconnect between sex and gender, and always have.

Ideology is the thing that says ... Persecute those people. Or shame them. Or exclude them from religious or faith systems.

Ideology is the thing that denies the simple power of observation, then fear-mongers like Francis when he ignorantly asserts that this tiny minority of humans represents an existential threat to the species.

Francis and other ideologues can continue spreading fear and ignorance, but none of that will change how trans people experience their reality of sex and gender. Because trans people don't experience sex and gender because of ideology, which is often wildly divergent in any given group of trans people.

Anyone who knows a significant number of trans people already knows that.