It wasn't that any one particular group of people were militant it's that GAF represented more or less middle class, fairly well educated 18-35 year olds in western countries, mostly America.
Middle class, fairly well educated 18-35 year olds in western countries, especially Americans, are a group of people with generally a well meaning outlook on the world and how society should be but very little understanding of where the flaws in society originate and absolutely no desire to challenge the one crucial flaw that gives rise to the things they hate most, economics, because economics is the one area in which they're doing more or less fine thank you very much.
The people recruited to the alt (far) right and Trump support are for the most part working class Americans who have been totally left behind economically and the media and establishment has 1) done everything in their power to prevent them from targeting the actual cause for their misery, the economic system of the developed world and 2) instead tried to deflect all anger towards what the establishment considers soft issues like identity politics.
The alt right and Trump are morally abhorrent but the middle class centre-left types that are common on GAF react by labelling their supporters as subhumans that were born without the mental capacity to not be racist and transphobic only pushes more and more people into the hands of the alt right, and furthermore seem to imagine that if only the world adhered perfectly to their indentity politics damands all the problems of the world will just disappear, as if the recessions and job insecurity and collapsing infrastructure are all because we don't have genderless pronouns on passports etc.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for most of their demands, I have zero issue with genderless pronouns on passports, but these people are playing perfectly into the hands of the far right by patronising working class Americans and expecting them to believe that identity politics is going to stop both parents having to work 2 jobs to put food on the table whilst their kids go to failing schools.
Economic decline puts rage into a society, and that rage has been successfully channeled into a war between two halves of the 99% whilst the 1% carry on happy as ever - that plays out online constantly and can be used to fairly easily understand a lot of current internet culture. The danger is in the long run, the failure of the centre-left to understand the plight of the working class and their pig headed arrogance in labelling them as inherently evil will push them in sufficient numbers to the far right to cause a collapse in the status quo and a return to fascism. Remember, fascism has never needed a political majority to become dominant.
I don't have much hope tbh. This is all happening in the context of about 30 years of depoliticising the population to the point where most people have more or less zero understanding of economics and class relations and the history of class struggle etc. Everything is viewed within a 2-3 month window of scandals and moral outrage whilst the establishment desperately try to keep the neoliberal party going behind the scenes. That will fail before long and the public are totally unprepared for that outcome and will probably make even bigger mistakes than were made in reaction to the Great Depression - which was a time when people were relatively far more economically aware than they are now.
If you are a member of the alt right you have every reason to be pretty cheerful right now. All it takes is one more recession and most the developed world comes off it's economic stabilisers and all of a sudden you have masses of unemployed working and middle class people struggling to make ends meet let alone buy the latest iPhone, and they are going to want someone to blame and they are unlikely to have the patience to listen to anyone explaining that the decline in rate of profit led to the deindustrialization of the west and the financialisation of capitalism blah blah blah when it's much easier to just blame black people and muslims and go postal. All that explaining is what should be happening now, before the fact, when people actually have a chance to develop some kind of understanding of what is going on, but instead we are obsessed with identity politics and royal weddings.
it wasn't even the trans community that was the problem.
It was the left wing nut jobs and feminazis who had to be offended on behalf of people who they think should of been offended but weren't.
The amount of times they would randomly pull a racism or sexist card when it had nothing to do with the subject and then get full mod support afterwards was a joke.
Here's a good example. Here you have an individual with probably more or less zero understanding of what being "left wing" actually entails, paroting alt right nonsense phrases like "feminazi".
It's very easy to point the finger and laugh/condemn, but ask yourself, why does he/she have no understanding of left wing ideology? Why does he seem to primarily associate being left wing with being militant about identity politics?
You have to answer that question if you actually want to have any success in preventing people like him/her from drifting further and further to the right. The answer is that the middle class centre-left have for 30 years abandoned left wing ideology in favour of broadly accepting neoliberal capitalism but attempting to maintain moral superiority over the right through sprinkling identity politics on top and acting like it is the one great social injustice left in the world.
It isn't, exploitation of the poor by the rich DEFINES society and racism/homophobia/transphobia are all secondary symptoms of that. If you don't understand that, you're not left wing, so do us on the left a favour and just admit that you're a "neoliberal capitalist with a passion for identity politics" because that's all you are, and dragging the name of the left through the mud just creates more and more SatansReverences and when society consists of enough SatansReverences then society breaks.