One positive aspect of the current cultural fad of announcing one is changing one’s gender, is that surgery is no longer necessary in order to be taken seriously in the circles that take these things seriously. Used to be if you wanted people to start recognizing you as the opposite sex from what you started out as, you had to do the surgery, and many people rushed to have the surgery because they were so eager to be taken seriously. Now, a lot of these people don’t even start taking hormone treatments, much less have surgery — they just announce “I’m now living as a man” (or woman), and it’s done. Obviously, this approach greatly simplifies the process of coming to one’s senses later on.
What’s sad is that the cultural fad of gender-changing has gotten so widespread, that it’s really hurting the small number of people who really do have some sort of anatomical or genetic or developmental quirk that makes them not fully female or male to begin with. Many of these people were raised as belonging to a gender which was chosen by their parents and/or doctors in infancy, and which later turns out to have been the wrong call. These people have a serious challenge to live a remotely normal life, and often surgical intervention is an appropriate part of their treatment.
I’m fully sympathetic to people who have *real* gender identity problems (and have had a passing acquaintance with a couple of them). However, the current epidemic of patently ludicrous announcements that “I’ve realized I’m really a man” (or a woman) is a disgusting mockery of those who really have a serious problem. Since I’ve had a passing acquaintance with a couple of the phonies in the past couple years, I’ve realized there’s a striking absence of gray area between the 2 groups. The phonies are 100% phony — attention/sympathy/excuse seekers who’ve latched on to this idea as a way to manipulate people around them into being “supportive” of what has been a self-absorbed worldview and lifestyle long before the first thought of “gender identity issues” arose in their manipulative minds.
I have seen a number of these transsexuals and cross dressers on the internet and these people are always flaunting their freakiness in public. This is not the way people with serious afflictions act. They are not going about their new lives in a quiet manner. Instead they are acting like everyday is a freaky mardigras parade.
I don't think these people are encouraged to first seek psychiatric help which is what they really need. The “doctors” who perform these operations are no better than the doctors who would bind women's feet in old China, so that women could have fashionable tiny feet. How about those cultures that put large wooden disks in their bottom lips or would put many metal rings around women's necks so that they looked like giraffes. This is just madness.
Another possibility is that this is a kind of distorted view of the self. People with anorexia see themselves as always fat no matter what they really look like. Even if they look like skeletons, they will always see a fat person when they look in the mirror. Would a doctor go along with this delusion and encourage them to starve themselves to death so that they could be “happy”. Anorexics are never happy no matter how much weight they lose because the problem is not really their weight, it is something in their mind that is deeply wrong.