Trans people have gender dysphoria, a medically recognised and inalienable discomfort - a profound discomfort - with being associated with one gender or another.
This is what you said @crankyassnoperope and you were saying it to shut up another poster and minimise their concerns. 'Trans people have gender dysphoria'. Then when you got called out on it you backtracked.
I'll tell you what it looks like from where I'm standing.
Transsexual people were always recognised, and always said themselves, that they had gender dysphoria. A mental disorder that meant that they found their own physical body very distressing and who sometimes found that living according to societies perception of the opposite sex alleviated that discomfort. Generally these people were few and far between.
Then the movement started to take off and certain trans activists decided that they wanted to start appropriating womanhood, gain unfettered access to women's spaces, women's sports, women's awards, tell women that talking about issues related to their biology was 'exclusionary'. Unfortunately for them, women started objecting to this rather than just rolling over and saying 'sure, we will budge over for you'.
So trans activists had to start using different (increasingly desperate if this week's Independent article is anything to go by!) strategies in order to try and silence these objections. One of those strategies was to co-opt the homophobia of the past and claim that the arguments that women are using now are exactly the same as homophobic arguments. And here you get the 'being trans is not a mental illness because being gay is not a mental illness and how very dare you suggest it is'.
Unfortunately this poses a few problems, one of which has been seen on this thread - trans activists cannot simultaneously use the 'trans is not a mental illness you know, you are just as bad as the old homophobes' argument whilst also using the 'trans people have gender dysphoria, it's a medical condition you know, so you have to be nice to them and do what they want'. It also proves to be a bit of an issue when trans activists are using the 'if you don't do what I want I'm going to kill myself' or the 'if you don't allow children to go on irreversible life changing drugs before they have barely reached puberty they will kill themselves' lines, but that's another thread.
Would still also quite like a definition of what BEING TRANS is in the context that you meant it. I presume you mean 'identifies with the stereotypes most commonly associated with the opposite sex' which to me just means 'having a personality'.
If you want to come back and enlighten us I would appreciate it 