It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

1. This is not a good faith representation of what trans people are arguing for; no one is saying that playing with dolls makes you trans.

2. Trans healthcare for kids does not involve surgery. Surgeries are not performed for people under the age of 18. Trans healthcare for kids largely involves letting them choose what clothes they wear, pronouns they use, perhaps changing their name. The most that might happen is that they take puberty blockers, a reversible and safe treatment.

3. I can see why people would be upset by your straw man, were it the reality, but trans people are not an abomination, and directing dehumanizing language towards a group of people who are frequently targeted for violence is profoundly not okay. It's been less than 3 weeks since a terrorist entered an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs and opened fire, and this has happened more times than anyone can count; don't contribute to this. And your straw man is just that.

There is virtually only one, and that's puberty blockers, stuff that has been used for decades to treat precocious puberty. We know these medicines are safe and we also know that nature will run its course again all by itself after the medicines are left out.

Genital surgery, the second option, is extremely rare in people under 18, and most of it is done on inter-gender children shortly after birth which is a grave mistake anyway and some countries have banned that as a result [1].

And in any case: Puberty blockers are reversible - puberty itself is not. Some things (e.g. the growth of breast tissue) can be reversed but at a high cost, some like the vocal cords changing for hormonal males cannot be reversed at all. It is way, way better for trans children to not force them through puberty.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-lgbt-health-idUSK...

Who exactly is arguing that it is mandatory to be gender fluid? I've never heard such a thing.

What I do hear trans people arguing for is that they have a right to exist, that they are under threat of violence, and that the require awareness of their condition and protection under the law as a matter of survival.

> The heavy medicalization of "trans healthcare" creates a rigid path from "affirmation" of the supposedly expressed gender, to puberty blockers/hormones, to surgical reassignment. There are significant social drawbacks for those who choose to stray, since 'community' support is conditional on picking the "right" choices at any given step.

You're just kinda putting quotes on things to make them sound scary. Do you object to surgery, or surgery being performed on children? If teenagers go on puberty blockers, and they decide they don't want to pursue surgery when they become adults - no worries, no surgery was performed. If they become adults, having considered the decision for a long time at this point - by what you were saying before now, that would seem to be okay; you were saying it was an unacceptable to impose a surgery on children, are you now saying that this isn't a choice you're ever okay with? I'm starting to get the feeling maybe you just feel trans people are unacceptable in general and that, whatever they did, you would disapprove of it.

I'm not deeply involved with the LGBTQ community, but I'm confident none of the people I know would bully someone who decided against transitioning. And none of the LGBTQ communities I've ever intersected with have been stingy or withholding of their support; they're happy to discuss my feelings about gender with me, for example, though I'm a straight man with a "by the book" gender presentation (and I have my frustrations with my gender and the expectations that come with it all the same, which I'm sure many men can relate to).

I'm sure there are toxic personalities within these communities, but it is certainly not the norm or generally tolerated, as bullying exists in virtually all communities but generally is not tolerated.

While a true statement it's also a non-sequitur. Anglosphere society is roiled with social turmoil about trans-gender identity. One faction would like society to recognize that some people's gender does not fit their sex, and to normalize accommodating these people's gender expression without intrusive and oppressive questioning. Another faction, perhaps motivated by genuine concern, or perhaps by simple hatred of difference and change, throw a spanner into the works by asking hard questions about bathrooms and prisons and athletics and such. If the only people interested in entering women's bathrooms and prisons were genuinely only women who happened to be born in a male body, then everything would be clear and unmuddied. However, the existence of some fraction of men who would happily identify as women in order to gain easier sexual access to women does complicate the simple distinction. Is a trans woman lesbian with a penis really trans, or a predatory man with a kink? Ignoring or dismissing the muddy implications of the question will not make the second faction go away.