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It's not a wonder you don't care about reforming the science to have evidence based results on if trans healthcare for minors has positive or negative results for patients if you've already made up your mind that it's unethical off other grounds.
Science should not be
Step 1: Have a view established off something else Step 2: Only accept evidence, research, and experts that agrees with the pre-established view and not the ones that disagree. Step 3: Declare the issue done with and stop further research.
Running these experiments is itself a violation of the ethics of human experimentation because, as detransitioners would be able to tell you, it can't be opted out of.
The same argument applies for signing up for experimental heart surgery.
Do people undergo experimental heart surgery because they don't like how their heart looks?
If there was an experimental heart surgery which changed the color of a patients heart from vaguely red to bright pink, I wouldn't support people doing it. I definitely wouldn't support impressionable teenagers who read about this on the internet doing it.
Oh, then you'll love the whole question of "people who want to be amputees" piggybacking off the trans movement, which in turn piggybacked off the gay rights movement. Welcome to the transableism community, and BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder).
One large reason this whole topic is a giant steaming mess is the over-reaction to "it's all personal autonomy, my body my choice, medical gatekeeping" push for absolute liberty on the part of the person seeking such radical changes. "It's not mental illness, it's my life!"
Except then that becomes the rationale for the craziness to seep in as well. If it's fine to seek radical surgery to change your body to fit with your mental model of what it should be like, why not people who feel deeply distressed by having an arm or a leg they want removed?
We need to get back to a common sense model, but unhappily nobody can agree what common sense looks like at this date. The success of having homosexuality removed as mental illness from the DSM meant that now all kinds of what can be described as 'alternate sexualities/orientations' cannot be called mental illness, and so the worst fringe cases get free rein. If we had the courage to say "no, this is insanity and not simply an unconventional lifestyle choice" we might cut the Gordian knot.
Your last paragraph doesn't follow from the rest of your post - indeed, it seems at odds with it. The transableism guys are claiming they deserve accommodation because their wacky desire is a mental condition isomorphic to gender dysphoria. The problem very much isn't that we've become unwilling to call these things mental illness! I say that neither should be classified as mental illness. Gender reassignment should be classified as elective plastic surgery, not treatment for an illness. This is what a principled stance for personal autonomy should yield, and cuts through all the bullshitting about suicide risks.
You have four healthy limbs. You feel really, really sad about that and believe you should only have three. Yes, that is mental illness, every bit as much as if you believed your neighbours were breaking into your house to smear shit on the kitchen walls.
You have healthy external and internal sexual characteristics. You feel really, really sad about that and want to undergo surgery to change what can be changed to those of the opposite sex. The only difference I see is that so far we have agreed to go along with the latter and not the former, as yet, though I wonder how long that distinction will hold. Somebody is going to do "limb reassignment surgery" (and apparently already has), there will be a movement and activism, there will be "studies show that after getting the amputation suicidality goes down and self-reported happiness goes up", there will be "what harm does it do? besides, it doesn't affect you anyway" and the rest of it.
You're a biological woman. You have healthy but pretty small breasts. You feel really, really sad about that and want to undergo surgery to make them larger. Is that mental illness?
I don't think desires should be pathologized, except in extremely rare cases. My belief is that legal adults should be able to get whatever elective surgery they damn well want, so long as they demonstrate informed, lasting consent. If it's kosher for a cis woman to get breast enhancements if she sees fit, I see no reason why the same right shouldn't apply to a biological male. Contrariwise, if we recognize that a woman who gets plastic surgery (or her ears carved to look pointy, or whatever non-gendered body modification) is just exercising her rights as a free individual, not responding to some all-important mental illness which it would obviously make her suicidal to deny - then the current classification of "gender dysphoria" as a mental illness becomes obviously nonsensical. It becomes a cheap and dirty hack to convince people to support transition, in minors and others, Because Psychiatrists Say So Suicide Risk Suicide Risk Suicide Risk Do You Want Their Deaths On Your Conscience. I think that is the great lie of the trans movement, and while I understand how they got there, I would like them to get rid of it and revert to a principled stance of "people can do what they want".
If you think that in order to be attractive you need Giant Bazongas, and guys really do expect women to be waifs with Giant Bazongas or else they're not pretty enough, then maybe not strictly mental illness but something has gone wrong with social attitudes and expectations diverging wildly from reality. And people addicted to plastic surgery do exist, and I would have no problem calling that mental illness.
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