A little piece of insight

[Tandora]

Into a topic so woefully misunderstood.

Are you going to withdraw your post to me and acknowledge that I never have done any of the things you posited as a thought experiment?

I’ll wait. I’ve plenty of time.

That is simply your belief rooted in deep misunderstanding and prejudice.

I never said you did. You seem
to be struggling with following the conversation.

So if it had nothing to do with stereotypes, what frame of reference is a male using to conclude he is a woman? I mean, you can’t be saying it’s just a feeling because that would be stupid wouldn’t it?

And that, is simply your belief, rooted in deep misunderstanding and prejudice.

No you seem to be struggling with giving a straight answer.

Does it matter? I make no secret that I do not care about men who identify as not men. If they are seeking to use women's facilities and categories then they are predators.

Yes the Dysphora can be helped with lots of time and counselling to help that child understand and accept themselves, they are who they are, that no amount of drugs, operations or wishful thinking will make them be what they are not. If you are born male, you are male. Removing your penis and fitting false breasts will not make you a woman, not now not ever.
A life is not long so please don't waste yours trying to be something that you can never be. Happiness grows at your own fireside not in someone else's garden.

Does it matter? I make no secret that I do not care

Thank you for your honesty,

To you it does not matter. To trans people and those who love them, nothing could matter more.

Yes the Dysphora can be helped with lots of time and counselling to help that child understand and accept themselves, they are who they are, that no amount of drugs, operations or wishful thinking will make them be what they are not.

This would be a great theory, except it's completely wrong headed. telling a trans girl they are a boy is exactly what causes the dysphoria- the intense, profound and visceral distress. That is what is hurting them.
Telling them they will be "cured" of this pain by accepting they are a boy/man because of their body, is as helpful as telling a gay person they will be "cured" of same sex attraction by accepting their natural, biological / social reproductive role. in other words - not helpful at all , just acutely harmful.

But some things can be made better and go away. Gender dysphoria is one of those things.

I'm astonished that you claim this. I thought there was no cure for gender dysphoria. Where are you getting your psychiatric or medical information?

It would be a wonderful thing if gender dysphoria could be cured.

Why is it wrong of me to say I don’t care if someone is trans?

I don’t care if they’re gay, straight, non-binary, bi or anything else.

What isn’t about the trans that means I have to care?

When we have theories to explain other people's experience, it's always really, really important to listen to those people who are actually having that experience and how they talk about / understand their own experience.

I couldn't agree more.
And as @Namelessnelly and others have already said, this applies to men too. The ones that want 'in'.

Of course gender dysphoria can be alleviated. This is the entire basis for transgender medicine.

They know that when you call them a boy it cause them visceral and intense pain. They know that when you call them a girl it relieves that pain. This is the reality of their experience. I'm so sorry that you can't hear this. If it were your child , more likely you would.

You're advocating lying to the child and forcing everyone else to go along with that lie too. A young child will accept the lie, but there will come a time when they will know that they were lied to. Puberty will start, and in fact must start. It's not optional to go through the puberty of one's sex. It's an essential part of growing up to become a healthy adult.

Until 20 or so years ago, gender specialists accepted that watchful waiting was the way to go with children and teenagers, because the great majority of them no longer reported gender dysphoria once they'd got through puberty. Why is it an improvement to have moved over to a model that makes them lifelong medical patients and still doesn't mean they've changed sex?

They still can’t go into the single sex spaces other than that of which they were born.

No. Accepting trans people for who they are is not "lying".

It's simply opening up your mind to the reality of someone else's experience. An experience that looks different to yours. That's ok. Some people are different.

To women and girls who have been abused by men nothing could matter more than to keep them out of women's spaces.

Perhaps even more importantly, nor allowing adolescent males into spaces which are meant to be for the privacy of pubescent and adolescent females. It's quite bad enough getting your first period unexpectedly without sniggering boys having anything to do with it. (And that they will never understand about starting to have periods or have to go through it themselves is really no help when you are twelve or thirteen and finding the whole business repulsive or shameful, as too many girls still do.)

The distress of the girls in question about aa real phenomenon is at least as real as the distress of anyone crying for the moon. There may be ways to cure gender dysphoria, but it seems very unlikely that affirming and facilitating the mistaken belief of the sufferer that they are not of their own sex will cure anything, any more than telling a child that of course it is an alien really and one day its real parents will come along in their spacecraft and collect it helps that child in any way.

(When I was an adolescent the fantasy that a child had been dumped by aliens for later collection was at least as common as the fantasy that a child was the Missing Heir to something important. Both involved the absolutely standard developmental stage of rejecting one's parents and assuming some sort of superiority to one's peers; neither had any evidential basis.)

But I thought being trans wasn’t a medical condition? If it’s not, why would they need medical care? If it is, why are people affirming people with medical conditions. You wouldn’t tell someone with anorexia they were really fat would you?

Accepting them as they are means accepting them as trans men or trans women. Which is what they are. They do not and never will change their biological sex.

I'm all for different experiences and people living their best life. I am not for society pretending people can change sex.

False equivalence. To me, being same-sex attracted is similar to being left-handed or having red hair. It's something that applies to a minority of the population and causes no problem for anyone else. Just let them get on with it. This can't be said for people who want the rest of the world to pretend they can't see what sex they are and to allow them to use opposite sex facilities. That does affect the rest of us adversely. Society also put limits on what we allow people to do to their own bodies. In the UK we don't allow people to sell organs or to arrange to have healthy body parts amputated because of a mental illness. We put age limits on other procedures. Why is transgender medicine exempt from these considerations?

Treatment for the pain this person 'claims'* to have felt at being truthfully told they are the sex they are also seems to include criminalising, bullying and hounding those people. Making it illegal to consider anything other than affirmation for other gender confused kids, leading inevitably to blockers, hormones and surgery. Insisting everyone else participates as they larp their way through life on pain of aforesaid criminalising, bullying and hounding..

*people who claim to be trans, particularly the middle aged men, seem to have a habit of retconning their childhoods.

That 6 year old is telling you exactly what is hurting them and how to make it go away- so do you hear them or not?

Most six year olds still believe Santa is real.