You write that “gender dysphoric adolescents have existed across societies for millennia.” As a cultural historian, I can tell you that claim is not true. Gender dysphoria is a concept, which arose in particular kinds of societies—large scale liberal capitalist nation states—at a particular historical moment, after the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, and the sexual revolution. Writings and archeological remains from other kinds of societies do not discuss anything like “gender dysphoria.” Men and women in other places and times did sometimes rebel against sexed based social restrictions, but that is not the same thing as our concept of gender dysphoria. Usually they wanted society to change sex roles, not to change their own physical appearances, and in many societies, adolescence was not experienced the way today’s teens experience it. Many societies have had cultural ceremonies for coming of age to guide young people toward adulthood instead of demanding they form an individual identity separate from their community.

There is a great deal of historical amnesia in our society today, and it is part of the confusion driving false claims about gender identity.