I saw this article from stating that 51 studies have reported that transitioning improves mental well-being of transgender people. I haven't looked into the methodologies of these studies. But it seems to be quite contradictory to my experiences with Western trannies, even the proclaimed "transmed" ones I've met.
Many of them state that, yes, they're happier about gender. So maybe the study is correct. But most of them seem to still have mental issues and lack of self awareness in one way or another - like there's an underlying issues transitioning doesnt fix. Or the older, quieter one, there's a version feeling that they accepted more that transitioning wasn't magic and they simply learned to accept themselves as they are, mutilated or not.
Sometimes they seem to talk about how they're medicated and creating stories about how it was a hard decision to them but eventually they're glad they transitioned. But they just sound like addicts to be honest. - that's something I feel with many who says they have depression and "drugs saved their lives". That they seem to not be able to look deep why they feel the thing they did. Just keep living in some sort of zombified bliss state.
I feel like there's an idea of sunk cost fallacy too. I wonder what do you think about the "reported happiness" Vs actual state of troon derangement?
It's very possible that people respond to surveys in very strange ways that serve to undermine their accuracy. Hesitancy to report poor functioning or outcomes so as to contribute to the perception that transition is harmful or undesirable seems to be an obvious possible issue. Consider, for example, the tendency for people on reddit who have regrets to add an essay worth of caveats to their posts so that people don't get "the wrong idea."
The real issue though is just that most if not all the individual studies are poor. The general design is basically just to survey patients at a gender clinic or butcher's shop then wait say 6 or 12 months and then just ask them again. Bucketize them, add some rudimentary controls if you feel the need and then publish. It would be more interesting if this sort of thing didn't result in positive gains in psychological functioning since you are almost certainly going to get either some degree of regression to the mean (especially for gender clinics) and/or a temporary 'high' due to wish fulfillment (I'd guess this would be more common with surgery). Moreover, for HRT, you're generally not likely to be getting them in isolation in most cases as you'd also be receiving psychotherapy and so forth so the specific effect of hormones isn't going to be isolatable.
A very cursory look at some of "positive" papers bare this out. For example,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5440516/ which measures the benefits of getting your cock chopped off finds that tranny health is poor before surgery then spikes at 1 year post op before declining back to baseline and ultimately finding that the entire exercise is possibly just a wash though the year 1 spike means this study counts as one of the 51.
For reasons of PC or w/e (authors don't justify this decision

), they also take women in the gen. pop as the control group which seems to be just retarded Additionally, aside being purely observational (a problem the authors acknowledge in the conclusion), the results are just going to be meaningless crap anyways because retention rates are just trash:
If you were serious about trying to figure out if hormones/surgery had significant benefits then you'd need to do a study with an actual control (i.e. therapy alone) over multiple years as opposed to this single arm observational shit that I everyone knows is just going to produce weak but meaningless positive results no matter what. Wouldn't hold my breath on this happening though especially since doling out the hormones ASAP has become de rigueur which to be fair is probably unavoidable, like imagine a clinician telling some Robert-cum-Lucy that you think it might be best to "focus on the underlying psychological issues behind [his] distress before considering more radical and permanent interventions," in any medical system where anyone has any choice that's a fucking highway to zero patient retention.
Also this is a choice quote from a random paper:
As though
every mental disorder isn't caused by an interplay of "biologic, environmental, psychosocial and cultural factors."