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That is the genuine problem for which I do have sympathy. However, the extreme cases around transgender issues and the activist rhetoric about "not owing anyone femininity" (which seems to translate to "keeping your feminine penis and testicles and your beard") make it difficult to maintain that sympathy, as well as the push for "so this means that nine year olds should be started on the transition path because of course every child who has concerns and problems around facing into puberty is trans and not at all perhaps suffering from different anxieties and problems that need to be addressed by therapy but don't mean telling them 'it's because you're really a girl or a boy, not a boy or a girl'".
Jesse Singal gets absolutely slaughtered on Bluesky for being a Nazi fascist supporter of trans genocide for being a conventional liberal who is positive on socially liberal issues but has concerns around the whole transitioning of kids and expressed such qualms. It's a genuine question of "when should you start medical - which means puberty blockers and hormones - transitioning versus social transitioning", because going too early does involve other problems later on, but if you are not 100% behind "this never happens and if it does, it's a good thing" then you are a trans genocider.
Anxiety around starting puberty does not need therapy, though. People have had it since time immemorial. It needs talking with the same sex parent. It does not need to be taken as a serious objection.
But the well-meaning (to be as charitable as I can) jump on it as indicating dysphoria which means "this child is trans" and then we get the "if not allowed to transition, they will commit suicide"
and schools doing things like hiding from parents that their child is socially transitioning on the rationale that "parents not supporting their trans child is abuse", though that seems to be changing at least as far as official policy is concerned due to protests and backlash:
Sure, I was taught that if I needed to talk about puberty I could go to my parents or maybe grandparents, but to only ask my doctor straightforward physical health questions and to not bother teachers, coaches, etc with such things at all.
This seems normal politeness and boundaries and not new-style paranoia to me(after all, it would never have occurred to my parents that doctors could turn me trans- it was simply assumed that anxiety about new feelings was impolite to discuss with them). My parents did, in fact, brush off my discomfort with starting puberty and I turned out fine. The need for conversion therapy wasn’t anticipatable-seeming and it did, in any case, work.
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