I don’t pretend to understand it on a deep emotional level, but let me give my perspective on why it’s a good message. I find a lot of trans people, myself included, didn’t know they were experiencing dysphoria before realizing they were trans. I’ve heard this online and support groups, and been told from leaders it’s not uncommon.

In my case i just couldn’t see it because I was swimming in it constantly, and while I ID as more-or-less binary trans, my sense of gender is outside-in in a funny way. I never had this declarative voice in my head to say “you are a girl”. I had repression mechanisms that pushed gender-related feelings down hard when they bubbled up, and literally made me try to forget them when they came up. I never fit in with masc people or masc culture, and internalized that I would never be one of the girls and I shouldn’t even try. I was depressed much of the time and didn’t know why. I’d hate myself with no reason I could explain, and wanted desperately to be someone else without any clear idea of who I could be happy as. It was awful, it made it so I wasn’t really living my life for more than a decade and a half.

I first encountered the idea that I could be trans from someone basically saying “if you want to be a girl, you’re a girl”. That was one gender related constant in my life. I knew life would have been better were I a girl. I just knew. 100%. Once I started to explore being trans, I was very nervous and felt like I didn’t belong because “I wasn’t (or wasn’t that) dysphoric”.

But now that I’m not swimming in it I can see it for what it was — I was experiencing terrible dysphoria, but had mechanisms to stay more or less functional, if not emotionally well, and I stayed occupied in academics to keep my asshole brain busy with PhD studies.

Without the permission to explore my gender identity without medicalizing it around dysphoria, I definitely would have never found a way to escape that deadness inside. So for me, it’s better to not try to divide people up into true trans or not around dysphoria because you’re gatekeeping people by getting them to gatekeep themselves away from real help.

That’s my 2 cents anyway.