It would be interesting to follow the money on this...
I do think it's really sad that we've gotten to a point where it's widely believed that there are no other options for dysphoric kids. There have been mental health options for decades, great work was done in '70s and '80s on supporting dysphoric children through to adulthood, but it's been made nearly impossible to access. That children with a wide range of mental health issues are left to suffer so greatly is a societal failure promoted by successive governments and others.
It does at times feel that they'd rather let people, especially kids suffer with mental illness if there isn't a pill or shot that can cure them. The therapy methods take resources, time, professionals - and we know even if as adults they transition that the end results are greatly improved with this care - but our systems want the option that they can make for pennies and mark up.
if you have ever met a child with gender dysphoria you will understand that this is real, but it’s also very rare. We have a relative who was 16 when he transitioned (f to m) but was expressing a desire to be a boy at 3 years old despite the fact they hadn’t even invented social media, it wasn’t mainstream etc. it is real.
It's been discussed in medical and academic writing since the '50s.
It was fairly well recognised by the '70s that gender dysphoria has multiple causes, including as a trauma response. That's why it used to be standard practice to do in-depth screening to ensure any other mental health issues were well treated before approving for transition. On hormone treatments used for cross sex hormone therapy, all the ones I've seen have depression among other mental health conditions listed as contraindications because we've known for decades that those hormone treatments can make them significantly worse.
If he went through transition before social media was invented, he would have gone through that screening and care before any medical transition. We can't compare that to what's going on today where the drugs and transition are held up as the one and only cure, not an option that is fairly extreme to be considered after other options have been fully used.
we do need carefully constructed trials, burying heads in the sand will not work, we tried that regarding gay people in the past
If we look at the experiments that were done and are still done on gay people, including children, as part of trying to 'cure' them, we can see why some are very uncomfortable with this type of medical experimenting on dysphoric kids.
And really, while shoved under the same umbrella, it's a bad comparison. Gay people are same sex attracted. Dysphoric people are distressed by their bodies and how their bodies are seen by others. The former doesn't require medical intervention and the attempts to do so have been horrible and should not be repeated. The latter benefits from mental health professionals and appropriate screening, dysphoric adults may benefit from further medical intervention or these days choose to do so, but when we already have data from these medications being used in precocious puberty of the potential permanent side effects, when we have the data from the Gender Identity Research and Education Society submitted to Parliament in defence of self-ID that the vast majority of dysphoric adults do not medically transition, when we already have decades of research on supporting dysphoric kids with therapeutic models, it is not burying our heads in the sand to question why those funding it choose to encourage the most extreme medical model for dysphoria rather than choosing to resource the mental health care we already know will benefit those who later transition and the many who won't. It's learning our lessons both that not every difference needs to be medicalised as far as possible and that quality mental health care needs better than this medical model.