The problem is that all of our currently available linguistic, scientific, and bureaucratic tools are built around the identification and treatment of physical disease.
Setting aside political motivations (big ask I know), when new maladies are identified through scientific inquiry, then it's fairly easy to reach consensus on best practice treatment for positive patient outcome.
That consensus may change over time as new information becomes available, but the pursuit of the medical science community is still focused on positive patient outcome. That's what I mean when I talk about the social contract in regards to public health.
When you look at trans people, they are asking for extreme medical intervention for something that is, given our current knowledge, not seemingly physical in nature.
Gay kids don't need medical treatment. They realize at some point they are homosexual and transition socially from being treated as heterosexual (the default social stance) to identifying as homosexual. This isn't always an easy transition, especially in the past, but it doesn't require medications or surgical interventions that have life long side effects. If your child tells you they are gay, all you have to do is re-orient your social expectation. They will be bringing home same sex couples instead of opposite sex couples. You don't need to have them psychologically evaluated, you don't need to take them to a special sexuality clinic, your child is the exact same as they always were physically, they're just gay.
Since trans people may claim to need more than just social changes, the medical and scientific community need to be much more deeply involved in the process then they currently are. If a trans kid is experiencing gender dysphoria, then the efforts should be focused on understanding best practices for resolving those symptoms and positive patient outcome. We need the medical community to systemically and experimentally and rigorously study patient outcome after various interventions the same way they would COVID or Cancer. A government taskforce should be created to fund and ensure transparency, and lawmakers should be prepared to accept the outcome of the effort.
Until there is a better scientific understanding of the medical necessity of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender dysphoria, they should be treated as experimental treatments. Anything else is grossly irresponsible. This isn't AIDS. There aren't proven interventions being held up by FDA regulators. The trans community needs to be willing to let the processes we have in place resolve the understandable concerns because pushing for poorly understood interventions in children is only going to cause more public resentment.
There that's my last carepost on this specific subject.
