@RapidOnsetGenderCritic and @BezMills both of your posts were helpful. Thank you.
Complicated stuff, this growing up. Urgh. Glad I don't have to do it again.
Apologies for the ridiculous length of this post but hopefully it's useful.
I think it's often hard to look back and remember all of the nuances and twists of adolescence unless we make the space to do so. Unfortunately far too many professionals in education and healthcare seem to have forgotten all of the stuff that they already know about growing up when it comes to the Be Kind end of embracing gender identity as a way to explain why someone might feel uncomfortable in relation to their sex at this age. The more you take the time to remember this stuff, or get information from others to supplement your own thoughts because you don't have the relevant direct experience, the more it seems so bloody obvious that their default assumption for why a teenager might feel uncomfortable with themselves growing up should always be that it relates to the normal discombobulation of adolescence, whether that's boys and tribalism/machoism (or lack of) or girls and hyper California-girliness (or lack of).
When you then layer autism-related puberty distress (e.g. sensory issues with body changes), internalised homophobia (fear of an emerging same-sex attraction) or trauma relating to sexual assault (e.g. a girl who was raped wanting to identify out of a "weak" or sexualised body into a stronger or less curvy one, for defence) it seems yet even more obvious why such children and young adults might be drawn towards the idea that the root cause of their distress is that they are apparently in the wrong body. The only "evidence" they can ever point to for such assertions about themselves is that they don't fit neatly into sex-based stereotypical expectations. Just as AllSlugs notes above about decoding TRA speak, it always comes down to sex-based stereotypes when you unpick it. Setting aside the gender identity aspect (e.g. by completely avoiding the use of any pronouns when referring to someone who is gender questioning or already identifies as transgender), this provides an opportunity to explore why a child or young adult might feel the way they do about themselves.
If these professionals were to remember what they already knew about growing up, the additional knowledge they could then bring from their subject matter expert training could really help to expose and end this sex/gender conflation. I'm still hopeful that enough professionals in education and healthcare are starting to remember what they already know and will see the sleight of hand in the sex/gender stuff for what it is 🤞 IME while getting support for my daughter, it's possible to unlock this critical thinking by asking some key questions that tap into this knowledge. It's not been a straightforward journey by any means but it does seem to be moving in the right direction - tapping into professionals' critical thinking has been key. Rather ironically, the more I educate myself and learn from others' lived experience (just as the TRAs suggest), like the adolescent boy experiences above and Marie's thoughts on growing and settling into an awareness of being a lesbian, the easier it becomes to ask the type of questions that can do this.
One other thing I've found helpful in IRL discussions is to only ever use the word "gender" when referring to gender identity. The rest of the time I just use the word sex e.g. sex-based stereotypes. For anyone immersed in "gender critical feminism" etc, the word gender to describe such stereotypes makes sense, but to the vast majority of people, IME, it just adds to the confusion. I also never say I have "gender critical beliefs", but instead that I don't believe anyone has a gender identity. I apply similar logic by never using the word "identity" to describe anything other than gender identity e.g. I never talk about my "identity" as a woman or my daughter's "autistic identity". It's yet another Trojan horse entry point for self-ID/self-diagnosis, and all the identity politics etc that go with that. Prior to my immersion into this world I used gender as a synonym for sex and identity as a way to describe a sense of self. It took a while for me to get to this point in how I handle these conversations but it's proven a helpful way of doing things.