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I think the steelman also includes a number of concerns about a patient's long-term interests and what they'll desire afterward, but yes, for the most part the Blue Tribe medical community position has been much closer to the tumblr/Ozy gender anarchy than to the medical necessity framework for about a decade now.
(and, correspondingly, they've not really struggled with the extent that the mental health component and especially suicide risk was no small part of what permitted under traditional analysis that they're, if unintentionally, rejecting)
That said, while I think you're directionally correct, I will push back on:
I think there's another plausible explanation: they think, with reason, that Blanchard's autogynophilia theories seems factually wrong, in their common form and any form but their weakest, and that Blanchard (advocates, such as Bailey) seem unwilling to engage seriously with counterexamples.
((Yes, I absolutely see and agree with the irony, here. There's reason you aren't very happy with WPATH sticking fingers in ears about detransitioners, right?))
As a metaphor that I do have deeper insight in, I'll point to other examples of what Bailey et all call Erotic Target Identity Inversion: treatment of fursuiting or feral-focused furries as 'autoanthrozoophilia' and 'autozoophilia', respectively. In this model, furries who fursuit do so solely because they're aroused by being seen as anthros/animals, and that this ties into the feelings of species dysphoria.
That's not just something I made up to strawman the Blanchard/Bailey perspective, but one that Bailey highlighted himself. While the terms are (almost certainly intentionally) a little weird and loaded, there actually are people who fit into the categories that they're trying to describe, and I can even give number of online psuedonyms for people who do things like transformation kink or where otherwise 'being their character' is a good part of the erotic purpose. And I'll admit that while the community isn't always adult-oriented, a lot of it is.
So these theories must be true?
Well, no, because there's more to the actual theory than just its name: each of these theories include some level of predictive analysis, such that the presence of an autogyne or autoanthrophile says something broader about most of all of the remaining community. In Bailey's take, the presence of some number of (bisexual or gynophilic) transwomen who hide arousal from dressing as a woman meant that almost all (bisexual or gynophilic) transwoman claiming a lack of such arousal were just not willing to disclose it. Many advocates for 'autozoophilia' as a theory take this even further, to mean every person, categorically, achieving certain therian practices must also have such a sexual interest first.
Which doesn't seem to be the case in the furry and therian world, and it's not particularly hard to find (common!) exceptions. There's a lot of overlap between therians and furries, but there's definitely non-furry therians, and not all furry therians are in it for the sex. Where there is a sexual component to the fandom interest, some people often just want to get railed by a Space!Roman chubby wolf, rather than imagine themselves as 'being' or becoming one. By contrast, a lot of the various fursuit and therian practices aren't arousing; "fursuit_bowling" unsurprisingly turns up zero examples on e621, therian meditation had a buuunch of weird results and 'get a boner' basically never shows up, and in the modern day mirror-dwellers don't get that sort of response.
((The first counterargument is that they're all lying, but all I can say there is that I'm not, and for a universal position a single counterexample is fatal. The second counterargument is that some rare outliers exist, but most people are lying, and I'm skeptical: there's none of the medical pragmatic arguments that, and when it comes to embarrassment... I'll avoid some of the more bizarre or detailed points, but for a relatively tame example, I don't think the fursuiter with a nickname of 'pool toy' would be worried about that.))
There's pragmatic reasons these theories are concerning -- non-autogynophile and non-autoanthrophile fursuiters or non-autozoophile therians want neither sexual practices permitted in public nor their non-sexual practices from being restricted -- but even before you get that far there's a certain Someone Is Wrong On The Internet about things. It'd be like some sexologist making weird Pepe Silvia diagrams from people who find motorcyles empowering to talking about how people who change their own oil get off on it: I'm sure it happens somewhere, but no. Just no.
Crap like Keo-Meier/Ehrensaft (in addition to just being creepy) speak badly about the intellectual honesty or commitment to actual outreach to the unconverted: even as someone who's thrown together a list I recognize couldn't be all-inclusive, they're got a muddled mess of ingroup terms without any real inclusive or exclusive meaning.
That's all there is, though. It's not even predictive enough to be wrong.
I have no issue with people rejecting Blanchard. To the extent I think there's something to it, it's probably fair to describe it as it's weakest form. It's the "knives out" attitude that bothers me, in my experience most opponents don't reallly respond to it.
Consider the ROGD example, there was valid criticism of Littman's study when it came out, but most responses seemed to encourage dismissing the hypothesis outright, rather than verifying it with a higher quality study.
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