I was actually saying that trans advocates who lobby for it to be made illegal to give a young person considering transition any information at all that might cause them to think again are selfish. Some of these will be trans, some not.
Youth transition is a horrendous meat factory of lopped-off breasts and shrivelled, infantile penises. It's children who never get to produce viable gametes and never get to experience sexual pleasure. It's children who go on to become medical patients for life, often experiencing serious adverse health events due to the mess that has been made of their endocrine systems, and often die prematurely.
Why on earth would anyone NOT want to minimise the number of young people who go down that route, by trying everything possible to reconcile them to the healthy bodies they have? The answer seems to be a desire to increase the size of their own "community", or the community they are invested in supporting. I call that profoundly selfish.
Using selfish to describe what you're talking about here might be confusing - I got confused, for starters.
There is certainly a collective self-interest in terms of empire-building ('the community they are invested in supporting') and in direct business interests (pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers). The empire-builders and ideologues have however undermined the growth potential of the pharma-and-surgery peddlers by throwing open gender identity to anyone who desires it. If gender identity is just a feeling, then no need for drugs and surgery, which some transwomen seem very happy with, as they keep their 'girldicks' and beards.
But the exponential growth in trans identifying youth who
have medically transitioned will have consequences that the empire-builders won't want to hear about, and indeed that is happening right now.
It's one thing to access medical treatments to transition if you are on your parents' healthcare plan or a college healthcare plan in the US, another thing when you get to 25, and don't have a job with good healthcare that will pay for your ongoing treatments. An awful lot of trans men are going to reach 25 in the next few years, after transitioning as teenagers or college students from 2013-2022 and seeking hormones and surgery. There are already significant numbers of detransitioners regretting their treatment, aged 21 or over, and they will grow in number over time. The kneejerk response of the trans lobbies to the likely inevitable shortfalls in resources for the ageing generation of 2010s trans youth will be to argue for unconditional blank cheques for healthcare costs and support, to file lawsuits, claim discrimination, etc. But over time, there will be more awareness of what the long-term side-effects and financial costs of medical transition are.
One should therefore ask:
why should society pay for surgical and pharmaceutical medical treatment for gender dysphoria? If the numbers increase significantly, this necessarily means higher costs in an era of financial turbulence and for the UK, prolonged austerity. It would not surprise me if some of the reasons for the revision to NHS guidelines were reached by performing a simple cost-benefit analysis - encouraging early medical transition incurs x costs over y years and is therefore a bad idea from a budgetary perspective.
There might not be the money to fund sufficient therapists to monitor gender dysphoric teenagers, since mental health services are threadbare in the UK, but the signals being sent out - the Tavistock's GIDS is closing and being reorganised, puberty blockers won't be used as a standard - are probably enough to discourage some of the medicalised fast-tracking (the gender affirmative approach) that was emerging in recent years. If trans kids socially transition at schools and online, but can't access medical treatments, then the chances of desistance are far greater. It could well be simply a 'phase' and something they can grow out of.
However terrifying the % increases over the past decade might be, the absolute numbers reported from both the Tavistock as well as US public healthcare exchanges for referrals for gender dysphoria which may have or did result in medical treatment are actually lower than the anecdotal impression of numbers of trans-identifying teenagers in some schools on either side of the Atlantic. Tavistock referrals are peaking around several thousand a year for the UK vs 70 million population (12.3 million under-18s). There was a recent Reuters story referring to some hundreds of thousands of medical cases in the US over a number of years, again showing exponential increases. But this compares with a population of 332 million, which means circa 60 million under-14s. (The unknown factor is how many sought medical treatment privately.) More common and more vocal does not necessarily translate into huge numbers in absolute terms.
Presumably, a lot of self-identified trans kids and teenagers are therefore not seeking or able to access medical treatment. There are anecdotes of gender identities so in flux they change from week to week or within school terms. Those who commit wholeheartedly to trying to change their bodies through medical treatments must logically be a minority. The difference might be similar to the experiences of the average teenage girl, dieting and exercising and worrying about her body, and someone with acute anorexia or bulimia. The epidemic of trans identification is as much a social contagion as the spread of anorexia in some teenage social circles. The hugely damaging aspect is that trans identitication is positively encouraged by schools and social media, whereas the pressures resulting in anorexia are more invisible (but no less pervasive for being less talked about).
One presumes, therefore, that some teenagers who identify as trans or non-binary recoil from taking the next step and subjecting their bodies to drugs and surgery. This only increases the tragedy for those who naively go ahead with medical transition not thinking about the medium-term consequences, and come to regret this.
