"I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that"

Yeah, maybe I wasn't perfectly clear here. I do think gender dysphoria (GD) is the gold standard, but a) I think a lot of people calling themselves trans today don't actually have GD, b) GD status can change, and c) I'm talking about an official, not self diagnosis.

I'm not arguing that somebody with GD should automatically be given hormones and surgery. Especially when they're children. I think surgery and hormone treatments should be a last resort when all other efforts to help the person deal with their distress have failed.

Again, the significant and irreversible nature of gender affirming surgery means that some percentage of people will always have regrets. The aim is simply to make that number as small as reasonably possible.

Yes, most dysphoric children will outgrow their feelings and become (usually homosexual) children. I hate the fact that this has become one of the many taboos in trans discourse. That's why I think it's important to normalise gender "non-conformity".

I think, for a lot of these kids, if they were able to explore their relationship to their gender without learning to think they were in the "wrong body," they'd experience much less distress and would be much more comfortable waiting for adulthood to see if they were in that 80%.

ROGD should absolutely be assumed to be temporary (again, in most cases this would fail a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria), and medical interventions should at least wait until the child is an adult. Given that most cases of ROGD manifest well into puberty, I don't think this would be a big issue in most cases with proper care and counselling.

I think adults really underestimate how impressionable children are, and how much of their sense of identity they absorb from their parents and friends. We really need to give them the chance to develop into adults before making these life-changing choices. That the ~80% desistance rate isn't enough to convince people of this shows how lost we are.