For the sake of clarity: "old school" transsexuals, crossdressers, and autogynephiles are all the same people

The contemporary transgender movements is an offshoot of the straight male crossdressing culture of the 1980s and 1990s. These men all fit the AGP profile to a T: Joe Roberts and David MacKellar were NASA engineers. Many of these men transitioned and had SRS. A lot of them basically ran empires creating and selling 'feminizing' guides (books, DVDs etc) and accessories. There was a lot of in-fighting between crossdressers and "true transsexuals" (similar to ‘transgenders’ vs truscum). Neverthless, they lobbied relentlessly throughout the late 1990s. In the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s murder, they demanded gay rights activists to include “gender identity” to their anti-discrimination lobbying and could be quite forceful about it. They were joining lesbian organizations as far back as 1997. Phyllis Frye (he defended a TIM who had married a man in a landmark case) is an attorney and he participated in the drafting of the International Gender Bill of Rights. Notice Martine Rothblatt's signature. Rothblatt is a friend of Susan Stryker. (the timeline of the article mentions the "gender identity" controversy and concludes with the story of a black TIM's arrest without mentioning straight male crossdressers at all - which is strategic. It mentions TIMs protesting the APA for "pathologizing trans people" in the 1990s)

from Sandy Stone's The Empire Strikes Back

Initially, the only textbook on the subject of transsexualism was Harry Benjamin's definitive work The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). ... When the first clinics were constituted, Benjamin's book was the researchers' standard reference. And when the first transsexuals were evaluated for their suitability for surgery, their behavior matched up gratifyingly with Benjamin's criteria. The researchers produced papers which reported on this, and which were used as bases for funding.

It took a surprisingly long time--several years--for the researchers to realize that the reason the candidates' behavioral profiles matched Benjamin's so well was that the candidates, too, had read Benjamin's book, which was passed from hand to hand within the transsexual community, and they were only too happy to provide the behavior that led to acceptance for surgery.

This sort of careful repositioning created interesting problems. Among them was the determination of the permissible range of expressions of physical sexuality. This was a large gray area in the candidates' self-presentations, because Benjamin's subjects did not talk about any erotic sense of their own bodies. Consequently nobody else who came to the clinics did either. By textual authority, physical men who lived as women and who identified themselves as transsexuals, as opposed to male transvestites for whom erotic penile sensation was permissible, could not experience penile pleasure. Into the 1980s there was not a single preoperative male -to-female transsexual for whom data was available who experienced genital sexual pleasure while living in the "gender of choice". ...

Then there's Reed Rickson, a TIF who was Harry Benjamin's patient in the 1960s. Rickson's family ran a smelting business and she grew up wealthy. She founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) in 1964, a philanthropic organization funded entirely by herself, whose stated goals were "to provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support." The EEF funded the creation of the Harry Benjamin Foundation and the opening of the Johns Hopkins gender clinic as well as countless research efforts, journals, and newsletters.

Dallas Denny, a TIM with degrees in psychology and sociology, took over EEF after Rickson’s death in the 1990s. Dallas Denny edited the magazine Tapestry (“tapestry” refers to the convergence of [autogynephilic] crossdressers and transsexuals. The magazine has existed since the late 1970s) and directed the crossdressing conference Fantasia Fair. He was a personal friend of Joe Roberts, crossdresser who appears in the Tri-Ess documentary. (check the comments for some overt old school AGP. They mention Alison Laing, a crossdresser who transitioned who published feminizing guides for crossdressers and the “Lobby Days” ) Denny has written guidelines for gender therapists throughout the 1990s and 2000s

A study sample from 1987 reveals that "(s)ome history of fetishistic arousal was acknowledged by over 80% of the heterosexual males, compared to fewer than 10% of homosexual males and no homosexual females." A 2011 study confirms this finding (69% self-report transvestic fetishism, 6 times more often than HSTS). AGP transsexuals have NEVER been the minority. As for AGP transition being pragmatic in some cases, this is what old school AGP transsexuals have done. (gaming the system + creating the transgender movement)