Bespin
Thank you again for your reply.
You seem (as much as it is possible to tell just from forum posts) a really nice, kind person. (Albeit that you have a recalcitrant text correction tool that sometimes makes your posts difficult to read.)
That apart, I think I do understand you.
I suspect you do not understand at least some of what I tried to say. But let us continue our efforts towards mutual comprehension.
My original suggestion was that there is nothing more to being trans than having an overwhelming desire to be the opposite sex - a desire impossible to fulfill. You, on the other hand, seem to think there is something - 'being trans', that causes such desires.
I do not say there is no such thing as being trans. I just think that being trans is the having of these desires, rather than something else.
Some people talk of 'being born in the wrong body', for instance. That seems fine if we take it as a metaphor for 'wanting desperately to be the opposite sex'. But some claim it as a literal truth; I think this is nonsense.
OK, now as to how we treat children and young people who express such desires.
It seems to me we should teach children, appropriately to their age and development, that they cannot have everything they want. Ice cream for breakfast? No. Not allowed. Jump from the top of the stairs and fly like a bird by flapping arms? No. Sadly not possible. Change from being a boy to being a girl? No. Again, not possible.
You, Bespin are trans. You want - desperately, more than anything - to have been born a different sex from how you were born. You wish you did not want that; you really would have liked to have been born differently, 'like everybody else', as you said. Sadly, that is not possible. But you cannot change sex. That is also impossible.
It may be that the best way to deal with such personal conflict is to live your life a certain way; maybe even undergo surgery to change your body. We can, as we should, go along with this as far as is possible. You are a grown-up, and you deserve your autonomy just as the rest of us do.
Nothing follows from this, though, about our treatment of children. It is important that we tell them the truth about the impossibility of changing sex, just as we tell them the truth about other things they may want but cannot have.
This is not like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. The consequences of not telling the truth in this instance are too grave.
Do you tell all the children you meet that it is impossible to change sex, supposing the question to arise? I think you should. Do you tell them that, appearances possibly to the contrary, you, yourself have not changed sex, it being impossible to do that? I think you would be wrong not to.
And, more than this, I think I have good reasons for my view, which I am prepared to specify. You, I take it, have an opposing view. But as far as I can gather you do not have reasons other than feeling a certain way.
In short, it seems we disagree about possibly the most important moral choices we have to make - how to treat our children. The only way I know to deal with such disagreement and decide who is right is to examine reasons for each others' beliefs, checking consistency, ... all the usual methods of what we call rational discussion.
It seems to me that you and others think your feelings trump the imperative - the moral imperative, let me say again - to base our treatment of our children on rational discussion of well-attested facts and consequences of the same.
There are consequences of this divide other than regarding how we treat children of course. But do you agree with what I have said so far?
Let me finish by reiterating my belief that you are a good person. It is, however, possible for good people to do bad things. Steven Weinberg famously thought religion was what caused good people to do bad things; I offer in addition the contemporary ideology of trans.