It doesn't really matter whether he means it so long as it is popular enough with the right people. And these things are guaranteed to be coming down the pipeline. Trump is hardly alone in this, he isn't even a leading figure in transphobic policy (yet). Desantis would so the same things, just more effectively, and there are hundreds of Desantises ready to be given power by the usual mechanisms. Trans people are a central focus of reaction and we will not be able to take the heat off of that without crushing reaction itself, which requires, and has always required, ground-up radical organizing (that liberals will then try to recuperate).