No one is lying about reality or affirming delusions - this is your misunderstanding and projection. Actually, what we are doing is acknowledging the reality of trans experience. Because trans experience is real.
It’s interesting that you appear to have a blind spot for people who’ve said “I thought I was trans but it was actually mental illness and/or trauma”. How do they fit into your attempts to define what it means to be trans? If they were trans once but they’re not now, would that undermine the ‘reality’ of the experience? If they were never really trans, does that undermine an approach of automatic affirmation?
I experienced “gender dysphoria” (wishing I had been born a boy from around the age of 5, identifying as NB for a while as an adult). I didn’t fit in with the other girls when I was young; I didn’t like the things they liked, didn’t want to wear dresses, preferred cars to Barbies. As a teen I didn’t see the point of make up, I wanted my hair short, and I preferred boy’s clothes and trainers. I had ‘male’ coded interests and hobbies, got on better with boys, and understood the boy’s social rules better. When I began to receive inappropriate attention from adult men, wearing loose men’s clothes helped hide my female body. Eventually I wanted to have my breasts removed - they marked me as female no matter what I wore or how short my hair was, and I hated them.
Was my desperate wish that I’d been born male instead of female “the reality of trans experience”? Would you have affirmed me? Told me I was brave and real and “valid” and used male pronouns and fought those nasty transphobes who suggested it might be an idea to seek some counselling (when god dammit it costs nothing to be KIND)?
The whole thing was actually just personal preference clashing with gendered societal expectations, combined with a trauma driven attempt to avoid the male gaze and opt out of gender stereotypes I didn’t want/didn’t understand how to exist within. The later preoccupation with hiding/removing my breasts was due to sexual assaults, not some innate ‘maleness’, and trauma counselling sorted that issue out. I’m much happier having had a lot of therapy and being totally comfortable being myself, in the body I was born with, than I ever could have been if I’d been encouraged to lean into these unhealthy coping mechanisms.
But sure, it’s ALWAYS real and valid, and affirming that people have been born in the wrong body is definitely, 100% of the time, the right thing to do! I’m literally the only person with an experience like this, so there is absolutely no possibility of anybody being harmed by your approach!
I expect you’ll ignore this and immediately jump back into suggesting anyone who disagrees with you is an uneducated bigot who needs to step outside of their own narrow assumptions and contemplate that different people have different experiences. No doubt you’ll wrap the empty statements up in some passive aggressive word salad with a garnish of moral superiority…how’s that approach been working out for you? Changed anyone’s mind yet?