You can care about multiple issues at once, certainly, but you can also only care about a limited number of issues at any one time. There’s more issues than there is available attention, time, and money in the world. This is a fairly non-controversial point. In these circumstances you must prioritize certain issues over others, obviously. And when you prioritize you should do so, surely, based on effectiveness (i.e. how much does one unit of time, attention, and money do) and on impact (i.e. how much human misery can you eliminate in this field). This, too, doesn’t sound very controversial.
With that said, the questions to address are: is this particular issue a good “investment” and, also, if it is ‘over-subscribed,’ i.e. if so many people are already invested that the marginal utility of your contribution is not worth it.
I don’t think we can solve these problems without some sort of massive central planning effort which is possibly infeasible, but it’s certainly not helpful to pretend they don’t exist.
Are trans* issues worth it? I think so, seeing as they are so simple and so can probably be tackled with quite a little amount of effort, all things considered. But you can make an argument either way without being a terrible, horrible person. After all, I keep hearing about trans* folk (approx. 0.3% of the world) which is a fine and laudable thing, but I never, ever hear about the Igbo (approx. 0.45%). This does not seem fair.
Not that I know how to fix it.
