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See if it weren’t for the children angle, I’m not convinced this is worse or better than any other body modification you can do. There are people who insert horns in their heads, dye their eye-whites blue, tattoo themselves on every inch of their body, and split their tongues. They’re freaks, and they accept that as do most of the rest of us. But when you’re talking about children making permanent and life-altering decisions, the issue isn’t trans human, it’s kids not quite having the maturity to understand the gravity of their decisions. If I choose at forty to dye my eye-whites blue (yeah eyes of iblis) I’m forty, I can understand the issues in that decision. I understand I could go blind. I understand that people will see me differently, and that I’m probably not getting conventional jobs after I do it. A kid just saw Dune and thinks it looks cool.
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The issue is that for a lot of trans people, the goal is to look like an ordinary member of the opposite sex, not a someone with a unique appearance. And that’s achievable if the person transitions young: they aren’t going to be a freak who looks visibly different from the rest of the population, they’ll just pass as the gender they transitioned to. Meanwhile an adult transitioner is more likely to be conspicuously trans and require cosmetic surgery to look “normal” (especially in the case of MtFs).
While fewer seem to want to go “stealth” these days as opposed to in the past, many do hold conventional jobs. I know trans hairdressers, programmers, cooks, receptionists, etc, and most go through their daily life without having anybody stare at them the way people would stare at someone with horns or who tattooed their whole body.
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