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I feel obliged to note that the sign of this effect is actually in question, not just its magnitude, because "desist and become happy with birth sex" and "never become dysphoric in the first place" are much better than "transition". If desistance rates are high without permitting transition, then we're doing dysphorics a disservice on average by tolerating them. Alternatively, if dysphoria rates scale with trans awareness, then raising such awareness is staggeringly -EV because it massively raises the incidence of the problem it's trying to ameliorate.
Disagree with this, along with the general framework of transition as a solution to a problem.
Take out social stigma, and I think transition, on balance, is a very positive experience for the average person who tries it. Trans people talk a lot about "gender euphoria", and it clearly means more to them than just "the absence of dysphoria"! Now I'm not at all sure that's a distinct, gender-specific feeling in the same sense that medical dysphoria is. But I think it's sheer common sense that a years-long process of reinventing your entire identity would make people happier: it gives you a sense of purpose while it's going on, and a lasting sense of accomplishment when it's over.
Frankly a lot of people might find it enjoyable to reinvent themselves in the same way, including picking a new first name etc., without bringing a sex change into it. I'm sure lots of self-help books have been written about this, few of them ever implemented. The way I figure it, the gender element just gives people an extra motivator to really make a clean break with their old self, whereas it's all too easy to backslide and fall back into the same old doldrums if you've just made a series of arbitrary choices with no unifying target-identity in mind.
There are lots of ways to re-invent yourself. Most of those ways don't sterilise you, don't frequently render you permanently unattractive, don't have side-effects lists including suicide (yes, suicide; tampering with sex hormones can do that, which is why we try to avoid doing it unless necessary), and/or don't leave you dependent on pharmaceuticals for the rest of your life. Admittedly, there are quite a few that can do one of those (tattoos, joining a cult, wild orgies without protection), but not many that do all four.
I think it's a massive reach to take "real outcomes are maybe a smidgen better than refusing transition i.e. utterly awful" and then assume that if we sent the transphobes to the corn field it'd be actively good. Transition belongs in the "cost" column, not the "benefit" column.
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