The way I see it, @ButterflyHatched is that you come across as a deeply unhappy individual. You spend time here flip flopping between “things are/were terrible!” and “my life is amazing!” I don’t think you’re arguing with us; I think you’re essentially arguing with yourself. You’re trying to justify the last 25 years of your life out loud and we are just your sounding board. If you were truly happy you wouldn’t spend your time here telling us all your woes, then pretending they aren’t woes.
You have probably had your thought processes and ideology challenged more in the last three years of your life than you did in the preceding twenty and you still can’t decide and clearly tell us if you’ve had a happy healthy life or a life of living in fear with health problems. I suspect that is because you’re terrified of admitting your life, or parts of your life, are shit, because that means we are right about so many things and people on contrasting sides of internet debates don’t like to lose face and admit error.
From what I have inferred, if your posts are true, you were probably the first child/adolescent puberty blocked in the UK, while it was still being developed in the Netherlands. You desperately need it to be true that it helps because you were experimented on before the experiment was even fully up and running. You don’t seem to have developed any body acceptance, because you tell us, then deny, that your body has problems. Given you can’t consistently accept and admit that medical transition has left your body in a poor state of health, it indicates to me that you still live in a state of denial about your body.
You desperately need it to be true that you would have been worse off had you not pursued this pathway, because you’re clearly not in a healthy state now. Without the truth you seek of medical affirmation being beneficial, you’re left with an unhealthy body that was all for nothing.
If you had Russell Viner sat opposite you for an hour, what would you honestly tell him? That it was worth it? That the health problems you have and a worthy price to pay? Would you ask him if he thought it through all those years ago, what it would mean for the health of people like you at your stage of your life? Would you be honest with him or would you pretend it was all rosy like you try here?
I recommend you find yourself a really good therapist. Someone non-judgemental, someone perhaps with an expertise in body dysmorphia, who could help you properly rationalise your experiences: the truth, the reality, what has helped, what honestly hasn’t, and focusing on yourself rather than your persistent attempts to apply your own logical fallacies to other children. All your posts do for me is indicate what decades of failure to work on body acceptance looks like and reinforces my belief that medical affirmation without any therapeutic approach to body acceptance leaves people still living in denial decades later. You’re a walking, regular posting advert for all that is wrong with medical affirmation, because if medical affirmation was so great, your narrative would be consistent and grounded in reality. All medical affirmation seems to have done for you is kick the body acceptance can down the road. A very long road.
I don’t want this cohort of children to end up the same: bodies ruined, still believing false beliefs about themselves, living precariously decade to decade. You could be helping this generation by grounding them in reality. You could describe the problems you have openly and admit there have been negatives. Instead you seem determined to not only to lie to this current generation about what you have been through, but also extrapolate that onto the subset of this generation who will be puberty blocked earlier than you were who will undoubtedly suffer worse long term effects because of that earlier blockade and extrapolate it onto girls with whom you share absolutely zero experience. As a result of these last two things, I have zero sympathy for you.
Stop pretending to yourself and the rest of us medical transition is a miracle. Stop lying about evidence. Most of all, stop lying to this cohort of children.