PDF | On Oct 2, 2012, Robb Travers and others published Impacts of Strong Parental Support for Trans Youth | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
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The evidence in favor of medical transition is already better than most other mental health treatment paid for by insurance/government, at least in the case of male to female transition.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2014.899174
Children are curiously enough not adults. This may surprise you, but it's actually true by definition.
Mental health outcomes in children are in general not interesting, since they are always good. It's unusual for a child to have serious mental health problems. I have always wondered what the point of that study was, because it's basically a Dorothy Dixer study. My guess was always that it was deliberately misleading propaganda as nobody really denies that little Billy gets happy when he gets to play with Barbies. The question has always been about long term outcomes, an issue that this study and indeed (AFAIK) no study addresses in a controlled fashion.
I won't deny the claim re. strength of evidence though; it's hard to say what fraction of practical clinical psychology has any real evidentiary foundation. So, in a way we can't be sure your claim has no merit to it.
Is it they themselves who report lower quality of life or just you who view their quality of life as lower?
Even though you're probably gone, the answer is that it depends. Sometimes, they explicitly say their life is worse, due to say diminished dating prospects (SRS seems to have mixed effects here, I think it's often a function of passability vs. attractiveness to chasers, which are not identical) or because they judge the difficulties or pain due to complications worse than whatever dysphoria they may have had before (often none). Othertimes, it's my reading between the lines, which I grant may not be reliable. This you have to do whenever they don't provide any kind of before/after comparison.
Remember that believing that things turned out badly doesn't necessarily translate into verbalizing regret on a survey as there are many ways for a subject to interpret an item. To give a concrete example, suppose I offer you a very favourable bet and then you lose due to bad luck, do you regret taking the bet? People often answer No to this kind of question, because their decision was obviously a rational one. Many SRS patients with severe complications seem to feel similarly. Of course, that judgement is going to depend on their beliefs which will be informed by popular perception, available scientific evidence etc..
After trans because muh brain, how about trans because of muh teeth?
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Even if this chucklefuck is representing the study correctly, you can't trust chink science, simple as that.
I'd never seen this study before, it's basically a kind of brains-by-proxy study. Since, sex differentiation is deeply conserved, then you'll observe all sorts of shifts when you have atypical hormone exposures in utero. Therefore, it's in the same family of studies as the BSTc, INAH-3 etc. brain studies are.
Like all of these studies, what they are detecting is in fact masculinization (it's an FtM study) and the effect is quite plausibly real. But, again like most of these studies, they don't control for sexual attraction which would demonstrate that the explanation cannot be so simple, since only the subset of gynephilic FtMs would display this masculinization (assuming autism doesn't also produce differences in BL distance or w/e).
He is not totally misrepresenting what the paper says though:
I think this is much less meaningful than he thinks it is though. It might also be added that 12 years on from when the paper was published, the only candidate gene identified is CYP-17, a steroid related variant that results in increased masculinization in females. That we've struggled to identify variants is actually not surprising, since any such variants would produce high rates of homosexuality, which is obviously very bad for evolutionary fitness. Hence, also the (complete?) failure to identify any "gay genes."
The bigger issue, however, is that he doesn't understand the fundamentals of thinking about causality in human behavior. In fact he doesn't understand The Fundamental Fact: everything is biological (cf. first law of behavioral genetics:
Everything is genetic). Every thinking person thinks that there are lots of anthropometric or neurological correlates of transsexualism. The disagreement isn't about that, it's about the causal relationships, the degree of determinacy involved and the relatedly, the importance of socio-cultural factors.
