Okay, lemme just put on my scholar hat here.
“And ‘gay ships’ online, gay erotica, can provide a vector for the girl to explore relationships and sexuality with the male objects of her infatuation — without confronting all that resentment, insecurity, hatred and self-doubt that is triggered by female love interest and male-female relationships.
“When it's two men it can be very seductive, because these girls love men, and they don't want to see the women — and it's like this weird, perfect storm for them.”
This part? This is actually a thing that happens. Women and other AFAB people* enjoy reading BL and slashfic because it’s detached from all the baggage real hetero relationships have, while allowing them to explore other viewpoints on gender and sexuality. To quote the Wikipedia page on boys’ love:
Japanese critics have viewed BL as a genre that permits their audience to avoid adult female sexuality by distancing sex from their own bodies, as well as to create fluidity in perceptions of gender and sexuality and rejects "socially mandated" gender roles as a "first step toward feminism".
I point this out because the first two paragraphs are an example of how a truth told in bad faith is used to prop up a harmful lie. The rest of the quote talks about this idea that “if you are a cis-het white person, you're evil, you're terrible, you're horrible, you're disgusting" – while I have encountered this idea in online circles, it has also been met by pushback from within those same circles. Bernard Lane, however, doesn’t or won’t see that. Instead, he uses this as a springboard to push his idea: this pressures AFAB people to identify as trans as an escape from being called privileged and oppressive. This is the bridge between the true statement (gay shipping/gay erotica as a tool to safely explore sexuality) and the lie: that it’s gay shipping, backed by “gender ideology”, that’s turning girls trans.
Now, it should go without saying that human brains are not that easily manipulated by fiction. It can reinforce already-present biases, sure. But Lane here unintentionally(?) parrots the sexist line that women’s brains are so fragile that they can’t tell fiction from reality.
Not only is this misogynistic, but it’s also infantilizing to transmasculine people. It implies that transmascs can’t be trusted to make decisions about their bodies and lives; that their experiences are less important than others’ feelings about their bodies; that they’re all just poor misguided girls warped into “fetishizers” by exposure to porn, rather than people for whom M/M media was a safe space for exploration and self-discovery. That is, until they go into into queer men’s spaces: then they’re homophobic fetishists trying to perform impromptu conversion therapy on gay and bi men (implying that no gay/bi man would ever accept or desire trans men as men, of course).
In reality, if a transmasculine person discovers their identity through M/M media, it wasn’t brainwashing. They were already transmasc to begin with. Rather, the open space that M/M media provides gave them the opportunity to discover who they really were. And honestly, isn’t that a beautiful thing?
TLDR; Bernard Lane is using the truth to tell a bigoted and dangerous lie, and transmascs who discover their identity thanks to queer media are completely valid. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.