It was started by a guy on Teamfortress 2 as a way to troll political discussions regarding gender identity in game chat. He basically made a hotkey that pasted this in chat when he pressed it:
"I sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. Ever since I was a boy I dreamed of soaring over the oilfields dropping hot sticky loads on disgusting foreigners. People say to me that a person being a helicopter is Impossible and I'm fucking retarded but I don't care, I'm beautiful. I'm having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now on I want you guys to call me "Apache" and respect my right to kill from above and kill needlessly. If you can't accept me you're a heliphobe and need to check your vehicle privilege. Thank you for being so understanding."
Pretty funny if you ask me. That said its very much been used by a bunch of assholes so its not really a question of hype or not. They just wanted to have a comeback to the issue of gender identity and they did not really have a factual one so they adopted this instead to try mock their opposition.
I believe it began with the pundit Lauren Southern, who pointed out the absurdity of saying that a person's demographic characteristics were determined by that person by saying that she "identified as an attack helicopter".
