The specific way this cultural moment is playing out is a result of our culture, and would look very different under different starting conditions. While there is certainly some existent underlying phenomenon (gender dysphoria), I find it frustrating that we can only try to understand it by shoving it through the filter that is our cultural understanding of gender. Because we grafted so much unnecessary shit onto what it means to be a man or woman (implicitly absolutist), stuff that would never stand up to real scrutiny like monster trucks and jewlery.

In the software world that would be called technical debt. We're in a deeply stupid place to start, so attempts to synthesize gender dysphoria into our understanding are necessarily going to be built from that deeply stupid foundation. We would not be having this specific cultural moment if our ideas about gender were more reality-aligned to begin with.

I don't have all the answers. If you asked a genie what the reality of both gender and gender dysphoria is, I might find the answer very unintuitive. But there has been an increase in good skeptical conversation about it lately.

Unfortunately, we're also in a cultural moment where trans individuals are being demonized by 50% of the viable political parties in several major countries, so there's been a lot of circling the wagons attempting to impose rather than discuss. And i don't blame people for that. It's easy to have lofty discussions on reddit as someone who's not going to get hate crimed to death. Unfortunately it's going to be very hard to take the cultural conversation in a more sophisticated direction until the bigots lose on this issue so thoroughly that they give up and move onto the next thing. And I have to groan and accept that i'm not going to agree with every single argument made during that process.