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Notes -
Apologies for taking a while; I'm not at 100% these days. Victorian winter, and trying to sort out a likely major career change.
Yeah, I phrased that overly-strongly. The point was that the amount of non-desisters looks larger than it is because some just haven't desisted yet.
There probably are some true non-desisters. How many there are I don't know, because lol nobody's done the 40-year longitudinal RCT. Almost as important, I don't know if there's any way to tell them apart from the "haven't desisted yet but will" group. I mean, sure, post-Singularity you can have an AI do it, but post-Singularity you have Clarketech reversible transitions and nigh-infinite resources so the treatment is obviously "try it, see if it works, and go back if it doesn't, no harm done" and the point is moot.
As in, I had phantom limb of having a vagina and often was a girl in my dreams. I hated my penis and once wound a hair strand around it and yanked (this left a scar internally, such that for years when I had a mild erection that part would stay floppy with the overall impression being roughly that of a broken bone).
There's more I can give, but while my cued recall's excellent my free recall is lousy so you're going to have to ask a lot more precisely to dredge it all.
A lot of those people seem to be counting from when they started showing effeminacy or the reverse, due to the human tendency to pull things together into a coherent narrative. I obviously don't see this as a coherent narrative any more, just a degree of effeminacy (which is real and still there) plus a period of intense gender dysphoria (which had a much-later start date and had an end date, and was probably the result of psychological abuse). If I were to count from first signs of effeminacy to the point where I slowly realised I wasn't trans, which would be a better fit with how they're counting, it'd be probably around 17-20 years.
Well, no, a lot of the stuff we would need for proper transition is not related to surgical technique at all, but rather to success at lab-growing new organs, which doing current SRS will not help with. Obviously, lab-grown organs would be awesome for a whole lot of other things as well (infinite cloned organs for rejection-free non-donor-limited transplant, lol) so they're something we should be (and are?) working on anyway. Potential retroviral therapies to alter tissues in situ are also a completely-different technology to what we're using now. Current transition therapy is a bad kludge with many inherent limitations, not a step on the road to the proper version. Iron lungs were irrelevant to how we beat polio.
On the other hand:
Well, maybe. Bit hard to find out when psychologists and doctors are too terrified of being cancelled for "conversion therapy" - cancellation with actual teeth, because of SJ's control of their licensing organisations! - to experiment with it, isn't it?
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