The gaslighting is unreal…
A bit off topic, but this does bring up an issue which I rarely see anyone talking about and only barely touch upon when they do. In the original sense, “gaslighting” was a form of deliberate abuse which served a specific purpose: to make someone more dependent, less trustworthy, more open to some other abuse, etc.; basically, a malicious act meant to tear someone down. By that definition, something which challenges your worldview, no matter how unpleasant or how often you encounter it, isn’t gaslighting.
But as in all cases, once an obscure but very useful word enters general usage, that word starts expanding beyond its original scope (and occasionally shifts to exclude the original meaning, as well). It also becomes overused for a good while, to the point where it can be difficult sometimes to tell if the usage is genuine, hyperbolic, or if the speaker just has no sense of proportion.
So… does “gaslighting”, as the term is currently used, require actual malice? In the case of constantly encountering things which challenge certain “truths” which are so wrapped up in one’s worldview that it’s experienced as an attack on one’s personal identity, it may be difficult for one to believe that it’s not somehow malicious (even if the source of that supposed malice is nebulous), and feels pretty much the same regardless. This gets messier because while “classical” gaslighting defined the term from the perspective of someone viewing the situation from the outside (because successful gaslighting usually required an outsider to get the victim to realize what was happening), the current usage largely focuses on recounting personal experiences… and usually within an environment where the challenged views are more acceptable.
I will also point out that, in this particular case, the people who are being “gaslit” about (trans/non-binary) are people who, in times well before the word got overused, would have been the ones experiencing a similar “gaslighting but [usually] without purposeful malice” but wouldn’t have been able to describe it as such, and also usually wouldn’t have had friendly environments to openly talk about it anyway.
TL;DR - Does something genuinely feeling like gaslighting make it so, or does it require something more?