Wow, something very similar happened to me! Instead of realising I was trans, I got a lot of queer friends and felt actual love and suddenly I was 100 times more empathetic which horrified me when I thought of how nasty I’d thought of people before.
HRT helped me actually feel again, and empathy made me realize that thinking “logic is superior” is really stupid and even thinking there’s a seperation between emotion and logic in politics is really stupid. Oftentimes logic is just justification and obfuscation of an emotional opinion.
The final nail in the coffin for me was when I stumbled on this Martin Luther King quote about how the moderate is the true obstacle for civil rights, those “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom”.
It made me realize how stupid it is to negotiate with fascists and bureaucracy. That we should get angry, we should get emotional, we should get active and maybe violent, when we see human beings stop being treated as such.
