The most important thing the trans lobby want us to forget is that this is a mental illness. OK the "I identify as an Apache attack helicopter" thing invites ridicule, but the "I'm Napoleon" thing isn't all that far off the mark.
I'm all for removing the stigma from mental illness. People with a mental illness should be treated with the best possible care aimed at minimising the distress caused by their condition and enabling them to live the happiest and most productive lives possible. But in no other situation does mental health care involve going along with the delusions of the delusional. If you're a mental health-care professional you know that you never agree with the patient that he is in fact Napoleon, and you never take any action that might suggest you really believe that. Only in this one situation are we being forced, not just to agree with him that he's Napoleon but to believe in our own hearts that he's Napoleon.
Another thing being played down is the seriousness of medical and surgical transition. Wear what you like, present as you like, but when you start interfering with the natural endocrine balance of your body and having serious surgery done on a healthy body, surgery with a fairly high risk of unpleasant complications, this isn't something to be undertaken lightly, let alone celebrated as "brave and stunning". This goes double for children and young people, embarking on a life of permanent medicalisation before their brains are mature enough to make a truly informed decision, and indeed in many cases when the treatment itself (puberty blockers) actually prevents the brain maturation that would allow a more considered decision.
Reports of unwanted consequences of sex-reassignment surgery are all over the place. Hair growing inside the artificial vagina created for an adult man resulting in a recommendation to have a speculum examination and hairball removal every six months or so. A faecal smell from the artificial vagina created for a puberty-blocked eunuch, using colon tissue to achieve the penetrative length that can't be achieved from the material available from an infantile penis and scrotum. Complete absence of the ability to feel sexual arousal in children who have been put on puberty blockers and then progressed to cross-sex hormones. Inability to feel sexual arousal in adult male transwomen because the surgeon didn't bother to construct a clitoral analogue. "Phantom erection" experienced when men who have had their penis amputated are sexually aroused. Chronic post-mastectomy breast pain in transmen (this is apparently also distressingly common among women who have had mastectomies for cancer so it's not as if it couldn't be predicted). Failed attempts at constructing an artificial penis leading to the organ becoming necrotic and dropping off, leaving horrific graft donor-site scars on the arm and nothing to show for it. (Indeed these scars are horrific even if the surgery is successful.)
Frighteningly increased risks of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, osteroporosis and cancer in people taking synthetic hormones. In particular, women who were put on puberty blockers for as little as two or three years for precocious puberty, then allowed to have a normal female puberty, are currently reporting all sorts of disabling consequences in later life, particularly in relation to bone density. The "transkids" cohort, some of whom have been on puberty blockers much longer than that, and practically all of whom have then not gone through normal puberty for their sex but progressed straight to cross-sex hormones, haven't really progressed far enough to show up in the statistics yet.
Then there are the social and psychological consequences. Very few transwomen and no transmen end up with bodies that can pass as the opposite sex in intimate situations. If the trans person deeply desires a normal "heterosexual" relationship with their partner treating them as and even believing they are the opposite sex, they are almost certainly doomed to disappointment. There's a lot of loneliness and social isolation among older trans people. Longer term studies that have followed patients beyond the first few years of euphoria where they're happy that they've got what they want, or are at least still convincing themselves that they're happy that they've got what they want, have shown that on average, transition does not increase the sum total of human happiness and may actually decrease it. Suicide incidence among fully transitioned people is massively higher than the population as a whole.
It's certainly true that for some people, whose body dysphoria is very severe and unremitting, transition is nevertheless the best treatment. Miranda Yardley, who cheerfully declares "what about me, I had my dick cut off!" has no regrets, saying it helped a lot. So it would be wrong to condemn transition as something that should never happen.
But all this celebration of the "brave and stunning" trans person, the coming-out parties, the trans penguins that tell children that they can be whichever sex they please and the doctor can fix it later if they choose the one they weren't born as (and the all-too-common subtext that it's interesting and special to be trans rather than a boring cishet kid who won't get any parties or special treatment), is doing nobody any favours. The mantra that any attempt to manage a child's gender non-conforming behaviour, or an adult's gender dysphoria, to avoid medication and/or surgery, to help the patient become comfortable in his or her own body, is "conversion therapy" and transphobic and must be condemned, is one of the most harmful things to have come out of this propaganda machine.
This is going to burn itself out, just as the recovered memories craze burned itself out, but it's going to leave a lot of unnecessarily damaged people behind it.
