Why on earth would a child be allowed to decide on life-changing or even life-shattering bodily harm?
We also let children decide on inflicting life-shattering bodily harm to themselves all the time. The classic examples are things like contact sports (children playing tackle football is pretty fucked up) and ballet. In the latter case they're like four when they commit to having deformed feet.
Trans children deserve to mature at the same time as their peers.
When do you think puberty happens?
1. To delay extremely early-onset puberty in children as young as seven or eight who had a pituitary disorder.
2. To treat advanced prostate cancer.
3. To treat endometriosis and uterine fibroids in women.
4. As part of a treatment for breast cancers, part of fertility protocols, or treatments for endocrine disorders.
This notion of using these drugs to disrupt healthy and physiologically normal puberty, was not even a little part of their purpose. It's how they're being used now in some cases.
The fact is that administering hormone disruptors or synthetic hormones are the opposite of what should be done, as gender dysphoria often resolves itself as the process of puberty and natural maturation unfolds. Interventionism, in these cases, is extremely harmful.
Adults making these choices are a completely different case.
The context was gender dysphoria treatment. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
> This notion of using these drugs to disrupt healthy and physiologically normal puberty, was not even a little part of their purpose.
Gender dysphoric puberty has unhealthy effects.
> gender dysphoria often resolves itself as the process of puberty and natural maturation unfolds
I never saw this claim supported by studies which did not include children who did not meet gender dysphoria criteria. And those studies found persistence predictors when they looked. Meeting gender dysphoria criteria for example.
The suffering in the moment is "I want" and the damage the treatment has in satisfying the want creates "I can't ever..."
Discussing that requires the broader context, so your redefinition doesn't work.
Puberty doesn't have unhealthy effects, the dysphoria does. There is also evidence that treatment doesn't resolve the worst "effects" namely depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation or tendencies. Those often return after the initial euphoria of getting what's desired wears off. It's why there's a fair percentage of kids that later regret having done that to themselves, and it's why the suicide rate for those who receive transition treatment doesn't actually go down, and in some cohorts the rate actually went up.
If we really cared about people suffering from dysphoria we'd look at these facts and be forced to reconsider how quickly we reach for these treatments.
If you are 11 and wait 7 years to transition, you will suffer irreversible physical and psychological damage. You will have missed formative social experiences. You will have to get expensive, painful surgeries to partially correct what was done to you.
To fix that, we'd need microneurosurgery on the level of science fiction. Maybe in a few decades we will, but right now, reshaping the body so it gets as close as possible to what the brain expects is the only option available.
And yes, that neuroimaging could be used as a clinical diagnostic criterion, entirely replacing psychological and psychiatric evaluations. The problem is it costs a fortune, so right now only scientific teams with big budgets use it, and only to publish papers. Over the next several years, with any luck, neuroimaging diagnosis may fall enough in price that it may become the norm, at least in first-world countries.
Could the MPS people get surgerey so they have more mouths, limbs or even entire bodies except the brain? How about the schizo? Would treatment involve a set of VR goggles with a program that randomly generates perpetually morphing fantasy worlds? How about we make the depressed colorblind so their world is actually gray all the time?
I don't see why a therapy would purposefully not treat the actual symptoms, other than helping a patient understand and cope with them so they can recover their wellbeing.
Second, you don't see it because you don't care for their problem, otherwise you'd either learn what the actual hard scientific research on the topic by neurologists and psychiatrists show, as well as the measurable results of the different clinical protocols developed by psychiatrists and psychologists, or defer to their expertize. You yourself "not seeing why" what they do in such cases is what needs done is as meaningless as you "not seeing why" any expert does what they do in fields you're not yourself an expert in. So either become one, or stop getting in their way based on "common sense"-based cognitive errors and biases.
Trying to make-believe that people can convert to the opposite sex, and even go back, is doing more psychological damage than accepting our differences, not to speak of the invasive/destructive treatments on an otherwise healthy body.
*Note that a disagreement about whether currently available medical procedures constitute a "sex change" is almost always a dispute of semantics and not of fact. A trans woman who describes herself as having "changed her sex" is almost never claiming she can give birth.
Disclaimer: I don't know any trans person IRL, so my perception is likely skewed by their loud online interactions.
See this article about muxes, the third gender of the prehispanic Zapotec civilization that still survives today, for an example of accepting gender choice differences healthily, without creating culture wars, and without aggresive treatments on an otherwise healthy individual:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20181125-the-third-gender...
Don't know the context, but I don't think this is a "trans" thing. It is usually considered taboo to bring up someone's fertility or sexual issues, even if said issues are common knowledge.
> Disclaimer: I don't know any trans person IRL, so my perception is likely skewed by their loud online interactions.
As an exercise, pick any other minority group, and try to imagine forming an impression of them based solely on reading about the group in culture war arguments and online controversies. I know many trans people due to working in tech, living in California, and hanging out in (bio)hacking circles, and I can promise they are sane and normal people.
I'm not sure what you mean with "opposite gender" (given that "gender" is now often no longer considered a synonym for "sex"), but I can tell you that all the MtF people I knew from college registered to me simply as men trying to act like women.
As for the second part, you imply they were failing at that. Can you describe those failures?