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This is a very reasonable motivation, and the mirror image of this would be people who transitioned when they were young and regret it, knowing that they would have been happier if they had just waited it out and realized that they were cis. I've personally known someone like this, who started transitioning FTM in her late teens only to regret it and try to reverse it in her early 20s, which still left her with many permanent changes that she didn't like. There's also the fact that if I had been a preteen in the current social environment, there's a high chance I personally would have been convinced to transition MTF, which, as an adult now, I know for a fact would have been vastly harmful to my life.
Unfortunately, until we achieve true technological transhumanism, false positives and false negatives will always be with us and cause immense suffering for the people in those groups. I do think it's incumbent on anyone who wants to make life better in the future for children to acknowledge the downsides of both and to seek out better ways to identify and prevent them. This not only means more concern for making sure that kids who believe themselves to be trans have to go through sufficient screening to determine if they truly are trans, but also making sure that kids are provided the resources needed to even know what transness is and whether or not they actually fit it. Which I see both the self-proclaimed trans rights activists and their opponents mostly failing at, respectively.
The base rates also make the mirror image scenario far likelier than you'd think.
Let's assume that about 0.5% of the population would benefit from medical transition and about 20% of gen-Z are drawn to being LGBT / gender-questioning at same point in their lives. Then a 10% false positive rate for gender-affirming care, would mean 4 detransitioners for every real trans person. Those are terrible destructive odds and I was rather generous to the current state of trans care with my the numbers I assumed. My personal intuition is that far more of gen-Z is drawn to gender-questioning ideas, that the base rate of trans-ness is less than 0.5% and that the rates of desistance/de-transitioning are significantly higher than 10%. But, I'll stick to these numbers for now.
This is exactly why doctors do not mass refer people for invasive surgeries early into a rare diagnosis. The odds of you not having the disease and reducing your lifespan due to surgery, are much much higher than the odds of saving a life due to early surgical intervention for said rare disease.
Stepping out from the moral argument, these kinds of statistical and logistical issues with transitioning are a bigger and dangerously ignored problem.
There is no end to the expensive surgeries needed by trans people to feel fully integrated into their new gender. If trans-ness is accepted as a human right, how do we plan to handle this massive new healthcare burden. If it is not covered by insurance, then does this mean that only the top 10% of trans people can actually transition ? If it treats body-dysphoria, then should all superficial surgeries be covered by insurance ?
I sympathize with trans people. They seem to be dealing with the 'big man in a hoodie walking down a dimly lit street' problem. Irrespective of a young woman's moral judgement, she is better off crossing the empty street. It sucks that those who tick more of those boxes are treated unfairly, but rather an accidental bigot than dead.
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