Exactly. It's the same tired rhetoric of "won't someone PLEASE think of the children" that these charlatans and mountebanks always trot out to sell their unpalatable evil.

I couldn't agree more. This is another aspect of it. Puberty blockers are an artificially induced delay (by a pharmaceutical means that is well studied/established in precocious puberty cases) because of not trusting trans adolescents gender expression, not because they are accepting it, let alone accepting it blindly. Puberty blockers were originally intended to give time to a pre-adolescent to desist being trans. The argument is simple, puberty blockers are not gender affirming care because no sex hormones are administered. The fact that puberty blockers have been framed as gender affirming care is a success of the Republican propaganda apparatus, and there is little we can do about it now, because conservatives have already moved the goalposts. They already have established that even talking about this direction as viable to a minor is demonic, and they will soon outlaw it too.

Cis guy here (pardon the intrusion).

The validity of an argument is not decided by whether the person making it belongs to a minority. It’s such an awful failure of leftwing discourse to engage in all this identity-politics bullshit, when what counts should be the arguments. Like yours. Because it is good and correct! And not made worse by you being presumably cis. (And if you figure out one day that you aren’t and come back here, that is also fine and it doesn’t change the validity of the argument. And lived experience is not a substitute for data, because if we were to go by my lived experience there is essentially no transphobia in the Netherlands outside the healthcare system… (spoiler: there is!))

Sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. In short: You and your arguments are welcome with me!

That’s why we need to talk more about actual hormones for adolescents too: By compromising the goal post always gets moved. The evidence that hormones work is there, if the bigots than manage to limit it to blockers, it’s at least doing less harm, even though proper medication would still be best.

I’m just figuring it out in my 30s

I understand this. I did not advocate for the "true trans" theory. I point out that it is used for gatekeeping. All those people coming out in their 30s and 40s are valid as well. Some may have been consciously closeting themselves, others might have been misled by extreme gender normalization. I think some might also have overcompensated, like Chelsea Manning said she joined the military to overcompensate being trans.

There are people who were dragged to psychiatrists like Kenneth Zucker: he and his PhD students used to publish and review tens of studies with GNC kids and present statistics of "persisters" and "desisters".

The sample sizes of these studies were typically in the hundreds. Who knows how many of those kids were subjected to some kind of conversion therapy? Many come out now and say they had been talked out of it by doctors and others. The figures alone speak of the real volume of GNC expression in childhood.

(This is not to mean that every GNC child is trans. This simply isn't true. But some are!)

There are also people who have fallen prey to the homosexual transexual / AGP gatekeeping, and have themselves thought they weren't "true trans", like the guy in the transfem literature novel Nevada.

But who is counting? Republicans have moved the goal posts of this discussion to a degree that to the average person it just sound insane to "push hormones and surgery onto a kid" because they played with a doll like once or sth. They say that this could not be happening if the Democrats were not evil lizard people and so powerful that medical organizations parrot their insane talking points.

So there is that. To sum up, I am making a list of the above reasons a person possibly does not realize/come out as early as psychologists say gender identity is formed:

• behavior normalization efforts from the parents
• psychiatric intervention in childhood
• self gatekeeping
• overcompensation
• knowing but being closeted because of averse reactions of parents/peers to GNC behavior, anticipation of averse social outcomes [^1]
• outright conversion intervention
• denial
• not having realized due to lack of representation, lack of a conceptual framework, or overly negative representation of trans people [^2]

[^1]: These might be different points, I am not sure. [^2]: I dully note this for reference, they might be overlapping with denial, I am not sure either.