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Notes -
Gender dysphoria and its similarities to more general body dysphoria
So consider the /r/loseit subreddit. There are a ton of people on there who hate their appearance and would like it to be different. Consider also the community of people who get plastic surgery.
Hating your body is a very universal human experience! An experience that sucks! The interesting thing here is how the different types of "hating your body" are perceived radically differently by wider society. As in:
(1) Consensus is that weight-based body dysphoria is reasonable and you should fix it by dieting. (It can also be fixed by medication-- semaglutide/tirzepatide, in particular-- but this has not achieved widespread social acceptance.) There is also a fat-acceptance movement, but this is niche and is discouraged by obesity being comorbid with a ton of medical issues.
(2) Consensus is that age-based and (more broadly) ugliness-based body dysphoria is something you should just get over instead of addressing directly. Plastic surgery exists, but it does not have widespread social acceptance, and it is socially acceptable to make fun of women whose plastic surgeries are bad enough to be noticeable.
The common line of "cosmetic surgery won't make you feel better about yourself" is contradicted by pretty clear evidence on average; a cursory google scholar search gets us https://academic.oup.com/asj/article/25/3/263/227685 , which claims the following:
(3) Gender dysphoria has, of course, gotten a huge amount of play in the media since addressing it optimally requires surgery and hormones in adolescence, when we mostly accept that people have not yet reached their full capacity for judgement. Plus, even in rich countries bio-engineering has not reached nearly the place it would need to in order to make neogenitalia function properly, or for "passing" to be easy for transitioners.
Is the current push for social acceptance of gender-based body modification something that will spread into other kinds of artificial body modification, such as plastic surgery for appearance or medications for weight loss?
I certainly hope so!
I think the issue is often that people are trying to smuggle in reasons why their cosmetic surgery is more important than anyone else's.
We can talk about nickname hospitality, pronoun hospitality, and the basic freedom for adult people with the money to do so to pursue elective surgeries, but that isn't where the battleground really is. The issue is much more around things like: Should government healthcare pay for hormones, surgeries, etc.? Should kids be allowed to transition? How are trans people treated when it comes to sex-segregated spaces? Is the desire to transition innate, or are there reliable ways to steer a majority of would be transitioners towards acceptance of their bodies?
People will put forward a variety of evidence and arguments about each of these points, but I think this is the fundamental difference with the other forms of body dysphoria you compare it to.
If people were pushing for breast augmentation to be standard for teenage girls with body dysphoria, I think people would be just as up in arms about it. It is only because breast augmentation is usually paid out of pocket by an adult that can afford it that it's tolerated, even if there's a stigma associated with botched plastic surgery, or obvious "fake" looks.
There's a lot of birthmark removals done for teenagers, often early teenagers. I think the current standard of care is 'anything larger than a quarter', and middle school ages are pretty typical. There's a lot of overlap between the technologies behind laser hair removal and birthmark pulsed laser dye procedures, and those usually target six months to one year. Some of this is about cancer risk, but then a lot of the trans emphasis is about health risks (eg, hysterectomy is strongly recommended for trans men due to elevated ovarian cancer risk from hormone therapy and probably from puberty blockers). And most of the limits on traditional cosmetic surgery for teenagers are focused on parental consent.
I think there's something of a parallel from social conservative perspectives, but I think they're more separating things not on the basis of surgery or cosmetic surgery as a class, but more because of the invasiveness of the procedure, the higher (although still low in absolute numbers) chances of complications, and lower opinions about the efficacy or even relevance of the procedures (and lack of trust in publicly-presented numbers for the efficacy).
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