I know I already replied to you in another comment but I posted a big breakdown of how trans healthcare for kids actually works and isn’t as scary as people think. If you are interested just check my post history. I Included the actual less destructive nature of horomone treatment during puberty in regards to the total number, invasiveness quotient and surgeries experienced later in life. But surgery isn’t really a thing for trans kids.

A lot of what you are experiencing with trans discourse is a poisoned well. The issue of trans health care has been sold to the masses as being too quick, lead by the whims of the child, involving a lot of medically scary things that seem irreversible and it operates in a weird blind zone where people don’t really understand trans people’s biological capabilities well or their psychological dispositions.

In some places it can be good to step back and ask where your opinion is actually coming from because this is a very convoluted and non-intuitive branch of medicine for a casual outsider. Parents of trans people and young trans people themselves essentially learn decently advanced pediatric and endocrinology concepts as part of the basic consent process and as a parent of cis kids that is going to seem a lot more scary without an individual personal proof of psychological benefit you get from seeing a child develop.

Here is the very common trans parent scenario :

Your child who has had massive anxiety all their life, They have stress related physical symptoms, they have neurotic behaviours that appear as psychological disorders, they get sick often and are withdrawn from social groups and have a hard time making friends.

You discover your child identifies as trans and asks to go by a different name. You adjust, you change their hair and clothes. Almost immediately health conditions you didn’t know were related start to clear up, nervous ticks evaporate. They start forming better and stronger attachments to peers. They start showing more verve for life and pursuing hobbies and sports. The behaviour is so startling and overwhelmingly positive it is impossible not to link it to that choice.

It really is the case where the science and care plans aren’t super intuitive for someone just dipping their toes in this water. If you don’t have a trans kid then chances are good you haven’t seen the day and night psychological changes to thriving from not thriving that social transition brings. It’s a process and parents know their children. Parents, as a general rule, don’t sign onto things that seem scary unless they are convinced. A psychotic parent also would have a really hard time getting a cis kid through trans healthcare because there’s a panel of experts that check all the angles from school and home life to a lot of developmental markers. Doctors treat children’s long term outcomes as sacrosanct so the burden of proof of benefit is way higher than the average person knows.

If you got any questions feel free to fire away. I am a part of a block of citizen research by a group of trans people trying to gain a better understanding of what is actually going on in the heads of cis people regarding gender. There’s some stuff we’re beginning to sketch out as these two groups talking across each other both with improperly established expectations of what the other experiences.

We are a long way from publishing anything because a lot of us are rag tag academics due to us being kind of a minority but there’s something up. We may be verging on a way easier future explanation for what trans people are in relation to cis people and it could be particularly disruptive to some limited sections of the non-binary community.

This is actually one of the key things about cis versus trans psychological makeup. It’s kind of more useful to look at the majority cis experience as a sort of flexibility of sexual phenotype (- what looks or appears male or female). The majority of cis people are actually fairly fluid in their concept and Preferrence of not really gender - but sex characteristics and they mentally adapt to meet whatever gender expectations and circumstances they end up in usually as a path of least resistance.

Transness (and a small theoretical subset of cis people ) actually experience the opposite of this : sexual phenotype rigidity. It’s like there’s a setting in the brain dailed all the one to one side of the brain’s expectation of physical sex characteristics. Gender as a concept of “feminine and masculine” as categories of social expectations of behaviour and culture is kind of is just the performative baggage on top. What is really happening is almost 100% about the body’s characteristics and the reason social engineering is such a big deal is because language is a mirror. If someone calls you by the wrong name or pronoun that is actually mapping onto you perceiving your own body’s through someone else and you can’t control how the feedback makes you feel because you are rigidly stuck on an independent internal reward/punishment system. Disparity brings pain, matching the expectation brings joy. Nothing is neutral.

The “gender performativity” concept a’la Judith Butler is actually more in line with a cis person’s concept of gender than a trans persons and untangling the two is really difficult because there’s not as much backwards engineering what cis people are actually like to properly compare. I can tell you though after speaking to a lot of both cis and trans people about their experiences that this is actually more like two entirely unique theories of how the idea of “gender” works where “gender” is actually meaning two kind of related concepts but not quite 1 to 1. There’s a fundamental difference that lies deep under this thing.

So. As a heads up the number of kids who actually have surgery before 19 are very tiny. The only surgeries available to people over 16 but under 18 are non-destructive breast reductions. That’s also available to cis girls without issue. Breast augmenting is off the table because the breasts are still developing and outcomes are usually reduced in quality so that’s not a thing. Bottom surgery is usually the last thing and the average age for that is in people’s early 20’s and not all trans people opt for it because there are tradeoffs and some people are okay without. The standout here is usually hormones and I think there’s somr things people really don’t understand about this process.

Mostly it’s three things

1. They don’t understand how actually stable trans identity is and how unified the psychological markers are.

2. They think access is way simpler and directed by the child than it is

3. They aren’t aware of the actual monetary and physical cost of NOT using Horomone. Not talking psychological. Those are definitely a huge thing too but most people have been introduced to those concepts.

On the first count : Trans people aren’t subtle. There’s specific markers of behaviour , the way they conceptualize specific things is actually really different from cis people. If you are talking about gender theory it gets complicated because they are dealing with something that is incredibly different under the hood. Identify is also very stable. It is vanishingly rare to find a kid who doesn’t keep identifing as trans if they are past the one year mark. Usually the only changes you see to the co-hort is them identifing as a different type of transness between non-binary or binary trans and oftentimes the things they physically require don’t change.

On the second. It’s a panel of experts. No kid is making this decision alone. All legal guardians need to sign on and then you need to have a panel agree it’s the best long term choice. Here’s what that looks like

• Pediatric Doctor - Makes sure they are at the stage of puberty and the general health is at a point where blockers and maybe later hormones are a good fit.

• Social Services Worker - Makes sure there isn’t something hinky with the home environment and the family is in a position to make an informed decision .

• Trans specialized Psychology - Makes sure the identity has been stable and trial run at a social level and that all the markers of a trans patient make the child a risk if they don’t physically transition. They really try to hold off as long as they can.

• Endocrinologist - A specialist on horomones. Assesses the patient routinely to make sure there’s not any underlying issues. If a trans kid reacts bad to blockers or later Horomones then it stops.

So for the last part.

Trans adults who don’t go through horomones during the stage of their development end up needing more surgeries and more costly and invasive surgeries than those who were allowed to go through the process of developing through hormonal changes. As an example You don’t need breast reductions if you never develop that tissue in the first place. If you are on blockers and then later testosterone you develop as a male and you still have all the internal bits that if you change your mind later you can swap to estrogen and have perfectly female phenotypic breasts. If you are forced to develop breasts and then remove them later you remove all the inside features and there’s not really any takebacksies.

A lot of trans development looks like this. There are a lot of details and the issues when presented to the public don’t give all the information for the public to make a well informed opinion on trans health. It really is kind of a specialist medicine .