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Originally Posted by Ab

incredibly rare, incredibly rare. unbelievably rare. impossibly rare. It's so rare.

I mean, autism was incredibly rare too, until we started to develop a better understading of it and some effective diagnostic tools to identify it. But that doesn't imply that it didn't have the same prevalence then as it does now that we have the tools needed to identify it.

Given the narrow communications bandwidth in the prehistoric, pre-internet times, and the fact that most of that bandwidth was controlled by either large corporations or the state, there wasn't a whole lot of space or opportunities for people to share their experiences of dysphoria with a large audience, and since those things weren't easy to share most people who had those experiences didn't really know what to call it or how to have a conversation about it, or whether other people were having the same experiences.

Homosexuality was considered a disorder in the DSM-1, now it is widely recognised that an individual's sexual orientation is complex and not necessarily something susceptible to treatment or choice. So it's not unprecedented that something which is perceived as a disorder at one point can subsequently become a legitimate mode of being further down the line.

Originally Posted by Ab

Historically the remedy for such things is time. The sufferers just grow out of it; they realise “wow, puberty sucks for everyone” or "oh shit, I just have Aspergers" or "well fuck, I'm a lesbian".

Is realising "well fuck, I'm a lesbian" really growing out of it though? I acknowledge that there are some things that people do grow out of. Is it clear cut that Gender dysphoria is one of them? You seem very confident. I'm not so sure.

Originally Posted by Ab

However, two big and problematic differences exist with this craze:

1. An anorexic girl who gets over it can return to a normal weight. But a gender dysphoric girl who goes to a doctor who cuts off her breasts and cuts out her uterus and puts her on hormone replacement therapy is fucked for life. A boy who goes on puberty blockers will never experience orgasm or sexual pleasure. Ever.

2. There was no "demonic possession industry" that had a vested interest in girls permanently complaining about evil spirits and which made more money the more that girls spread the contagion to their friends. There were no cutting referral schemes. There were no "anorexia industry sector planners" making investment projections based on current rates of contagion. For this craze, there's all that stuff. In the USA, all that surgery and all that treatment is the sound of cash registers ringing for ever for the medical-industrial complex.

1 depends on the assumption that there are a large number of people who regret their transition. But it seems like that's not really the case. It looks like the vast majority of them are generally happy with their transition. If you look at what the small number of trans people who did detransition say about their reasons for detransitioning, then you find that the vast majority of them basically cite the social recriminations heaped upon them by people who don't accept their identity. Only a small percentage of the very small percentage to detransition state that the reason was because transition was the wrong thing to have done in the first place.

2 is some a-grade tin-foil hat conspiracy juice.