Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What we don’t like makes us special.

All a diagnosis of gender dysphoria tells us is that a patient is in distress and is ruminating about his or her body. That by itself should only be the beginning of a proper clinical assessment, but far too often it’s treated like a conclusion. [Artymorty]

Exactly. One of the most evil things that gender ideology does is to claim that dysphoria = trans, skipping right past the phenomenon of “desistance”*. The motivation to fast track children into “social transitioning”, puberty blockers, surgical procedures, etc., is to short-circuit and pre-empt desistance by pretending it doesn’t exist, because the alternative is that “transness” doesn’t exist. After all, how can a supposed “gender identity” be anything core, fundamental, unchanging, or eternal, if you can outgrow it? But recruit/trap them before they get a chance to think about things too much, and you’ve won yourself a whole cohort of children (and often parents), who are now fully committed. Having invested their very bodies (or those of their children) in the “cause,” these True Believers will be all the more motivated to defend the ideology, rather than admit that they were fooled and misled by adults who should have known better, and that they have made horrible, irreversible mistakes.

Regret and detransition must, like desistance, be hidden and denied, because it is not the actual health and wellbeing of children that must be defended but their “transness”. Admitting the possibility of mistaken diagnoses leads to questioning the the standards used for a diagnosis of “transness” in the first place. Can’t have that. This is the real meaning behind all of those “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirts. It’s not children being “protected”, but their “diagnosis” as trans. This is tragically ironic: “gender affirming care” is going to inflict more harm on these children than “cis” society is ever likely to. Buying into the “dysphoria = trans” claim means more mutilated, sterilized children. Who’s protecting them?

For those children whose mental or psychological distress is not resolved by going through puberty, whatever it is they are suffering from, it can not be the result of having been “born in the wrong body.” That does not happen. If this supposed “cause” is taken off the table, what is left of “transness” at all? Very little, apart from a movement of bullying, intimidation, and emotional blackmail led by predatory, misogynistic, narcissistic, fetishists.

* We’re often told by gender activists that we must “educate ourselves” about trans “rights”. I believe that most of us here have done exactly that. But we have not reached their approved conclusion. They’re not interested in truth or enlightenment. They want obedience and submission. They want us to re-educate ourselves, more in the spirit of Mao than of Mill.

In regards to education around trans “rights”, I’ve sometimes thought that a good start to getting people to see gender ideology for what it is would be to get them to examine and understand the following concepts:

Desistance and detransitioning

Forced Teaming

DARVO

Institutional Capture

DSD vs “Intersex”

Autogynephilia

among others. Feel free to add to this list.