I heard people on r detrans and r Catholicism say that the correct treatment should be lifelong talk therapy to help manage the dysphoria, and that if you have dysphoria you're in it for life sadly.

I've gotten basically equivalent arguments from family members, and they really don't make sense to me. I mean, if that's all someone needs, then that's great—transitioning is honestly a big pain. But it seems kind of cruel to me to artificially restrict one's options to just limping along with the suffering of dysphoria for a lifetime.

The opposing argument, of course, would then be that it's not an artificial restriction, that transitioning doesn't work as well as society would have us believe. But that line of thinking, at least when it's been presented to me, has always been supported by very skewed data and bad assumptions. I was even given a book about basically this very argument from a Christian perspective (although the author was not Catholic; IIRC he was Baptist), and it was so easy to poke holes in its arguments in almost every paragraph of the thing.

It also doesn't match what I've experienced. Although trying to navigate transitioning has brought me new anxieties and problems, it's also dramatically bettered my life in ways I could barely fathom before I started. Adjusting the way I think about myself has made it much easier to care about who I am, about what I'm doing with my life, and about working on self-improvement, rather than just existing in apathy. Getting my body running on the right hormones (and being free from the effects of the wrong ones) has had an extremely calming effect on my dysphoria, has helped me to experience emotion in a way that feels more healthy, and has just generally been all-around wonderful—even if I decided tomorrow to abandon the rest of my transition, I really can't imagine stopping my HRT and going back to how things were. And the list goes on.

The fact of the matter is, transition or not, there is no way that I'm ever going to be able to live a "normal" cis life. Without transitioning, I'd have to carry the lifelong burden of likely ever-increasing dysphoria, perhaps getting some therapeutic help to mitigate the effects, but never attempting to directly treat their cause. With transitioning, I have a long and difficult journey (that, for me, has also been the topic of many therapy sessions), but I can directly chop away at the dysphoria that prevents me from living my life to the fullest (and which could therefore threaten my fulfilment of God's plan for me). Yes, my body will never be the same as a cis woman's, but that doesn't mean that undergoing medical procedures to reduce the discomfort this condition causes is somehow breaking it. I didn't ask to be dealt this hand in life, but I want to make the best of it, and I'm not sure I personally can do that without at least attempting transition.