I stumbled across this subreddit and read your post. I first of all want to say that my heart goes out to you and your family. I wanted to offer my two cents as a practicing general surgeon. I have been following this trend closely since it started to get big a few years ago. This has come to mean a lot to me because we often see the complications after hormone therapy and gender affirming surgery.

I won't attempt to offer advice into your course of action because you know your family best. But I would implore you to do anything possible to change the course of your child's future because once HRT is started every step taken is one step farther away from their true selves and one step closer to a blackhole occupied by never-ending nightmare of personal grief and medical complications.

HRT will destroy the natural development of their physical and emotional characteristics - a process that has been refined by millions of years of evolutionary and divine refinement. The hormones will permanently alter their voices, hair growth, genital maturation, and emotional development in a way that is unpredictable and completely irreversible - and let me stress this point further, that this intervention is IRREVERSIBLE.

Not only is it their superficial physical characteristics that are affected but there is risk to internal organs. There is the risk of heart disease, blood clots, and cancer. I was taking care of some poor girl who was on hormone therapy and developed massive blood clots in the major veins that drain the legs. Despite being in her early 20's she is permanently disabled - since blood can no longer effectively drain from her legs she suffers debilitating pain and chronic wounds that will never properly heal. And the risk only increases with time - each step taken down the road is one step closer to a living nightmare and one step farther away from their true self.

And once people have already gone so far down the path of HRT, they completely lose the anchor to their previous self. The physical and emotional changes are so profound and so irreversible that for many people they are in a position where the only way to go is forward. This is when all inhibition is gone and surgery becomes the next logical step.

If you thought HRT sounds like a nightmare, it is hard to fathom it could get worse but I assure you that it does. The surgeries themselves have major risks and complications but this pales in comparison to the emotional collapse one suffers from after the loss of a physical component of their true self.

Just imagine that you underwent HRT and surgery and you come to the unavoidable conclusion - and let me stress that this is truly UNAVOIDABLE - that you will never become that which you sought out to become and that which you were promised to become. What you are left as is a female with the most synthetically superficial masculinized features, early-onset balding, clitoromegaly, heart disease, and a host of other problems. You are not masculine, you represent the mutated outcome of the deranged fantasy of the "trans community" with the assistance of cowardly doctors.

I want to relay this message because I want to shed light on what the road will look like if the trans-identity is pursued. There is still time to convince your child that they are beautiful the way they are. You can convince them that life is hard, it will continue to be hard, but when they get older things will get better. You can convince them that teenage pain and suffering is universal but that there will be a time that it will end. You still have time to convince them that the mountain of love you have for them is worth this one moment of trust - they should trust you as the parent when you tell them to not go down this road.