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Firstly, I think it's profoundly condescending to tell someone they've been "fed" cherry-picked stories, dumb sheeple that they are. Secondly, @Shakes wasn't passing a value judgement on the efficacy of bottom surgery: the part of his comment that you quoted is literally just an (accurate) description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Thirdly, it's rather hypocritical of you to accuse someone of having fallen for cherry-picked stories that portray bottom surgery negatively, then link to a subreddit that selects for people who are happy with their surgeries while excluding detransitioners (or, more sadly, people who took their own lives after undergoing bottom surgery). Fight cherry-picking with studies and meta-analyses, not cherry-picking in the opposite direction.
This proves too much. Heroin addicts claim to feel better when they use heroin. (I don't even disbelieve them – I'm sure they do feel happier in the short-term.) The fact that gender reassignment surgeries open their recipients up to a host of health problems they would not otherwise have had seems as good an "objective" metric as any other. As you more or less concede in the top-level comment, the question of whether surgical transition actually improves trans people's mental flourishing certainly seems to be an open one, and the point of medical studies is to give us hard data which will inform our decisions on whether it's a good idea for individual patients. If 90% of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria saw a durable uplift to their subjective well-being after undergoing surgical transition, it would be a no-brainer. 70%? Sure. 50%? Hmm – you might need to have a bit of a think about that one. 30%? Probably not until you've already tried several years of talk therapy. 10%? Only as a matter of last resort for those in such severe psychic distress that it's this or suicide.
If a person is considering undergoing a major elective medical procedure which will render it impossible for them to have children and opens them up to a host of medical problems they would not otherwise have had, we need robust data on the efficacy of that procedure in improving its recipients' subjective sense of well-being. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "well, some people feel better afterwards" simply isn't good enough. (All of this goes double if you're expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill, as some trans activists demand.)
Personally, I support bodily autonomy for adults – but if one of my loved ones was considering surgically transitioning, I would do everything in my power to try to dissuade them. (In much the same way that I support the right of adults to practise polyamory or pursue careers in pornography or the entertainment industries, even though I know that the overwhelming majority of people who do so will see their subjective well-being take a hit as a result. If a close female friend of mine was considering starting an OnlyFans, I would support her right to do so, but I would also tell her that this is a decision she will almost certainly regret.)
When convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are demanding to serve their sentences in the female estate and these demands are being granted – then yes, this is a woke perversion to be fought. It's pure historical revisionism to claim that gender-critical people started this fight and that "trans people just want to live their lives in peace".
I know I keep referencing this example, but it's because I simply can't effin' believe it happened in reality. And the trans cheerleaders still insist this is a real lady who is being oppressed and discriminated against and horribly mistreated by not being allowed back into a women's jail (presumably to impregnate more of her cellmates?)
And this all happened as a result of laws supposed to be anti-discriminatory, which then got twisted into test cases and "yes, the prison system of this state can be forced to put a guy with functioning male reproductive system into a women's prison" was the result.
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