Outcomes

After all of these decades of studying people and treating them, we still don't fully understand what causes gender dysphoria. However, that there are variants to every process involving biology makes perfect sense because none are devoid of them.

Thus we have developed methods to treat it as best we can in ways that soothe the discomfort of the person. It isn't cured as much as mitigated to the point where in the best of cases it disappears into a low hum in the background. 

I used to be much more interested in the mechanics of causation but now focus more on outcome. If something works and the person is happier and calmer then the method applied was the correct one. 

Unfortunately for transgender people they ran head first into the politics of gender which included very fervent views on birth sex being the only determinant for how people should be viewed and treated in society. But if we were to remove ignorance and transphobia from the picture, we would see that by in large what we have been doing to treat patients works well. Yes  not everyone will make the right call, but then there are far worse dissatisfaction statistical outcomes for plastic surgery decisions among the population. 

If we then remove people who express gender variance solely for expression from our worry list, what remain are people who are being identified and treated much sooner in life than ever before in our history. That this is creating a backlash is hardly surprising and besides some earnest concern for how early is too early, there are those who use the situation to discriminate against all transgender people and remove all access to medical help. 

My own approach combined researching the topic with understanding where my stopping point needed to be which took decades but then I am not today's typical test case. Most transgender youth come our far younger than I did as well as to self-acceptance much sooner which means their work to reverse impediments should be less cumbersome provided they live within a family structure with empathy and a willingness to help them. 

Life isn't perfect but if we shoot for outcomes where distress is minimized and mental health is improved then the method used was the right one.