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Notes -
This is interesting, though yeah, it'd never fly, at least in the Western world. But the problem here is that it restricts us to trans people who meaningfully 'had' GID in a psychiatric sense before, which puts us askew from my theory. As I said, I'm very much of the mind that there are lots of people who aren't dysphoric with their birth sex, but still find themselves happier once they transition. Genderfluid people, for a start. Indeed, this is what I think is behind a lot of the "social contagion" model: people who definitely didn't have dysphoria before they learned transition was a thing, but definitely want transition once they know it's available, because they correctly predict they would like it. I don't find there to be anything sinister about this.
If we had invented surgery that can make people fly like Peter Pan, I expect a lot of people would start to yearn for it very badly, and be very miserable if it were denied to them for arbitrary legal reasons - even people who hadn't previously thought of "I want to be able to fly" as some great unfulfilled desire in their life. That doesn't make "wanting the flight surgery" a mysterious social contagion, and it doesn't mean huge chunks of the population were flight-dysphoric "all along" without knowing. It's just people starting to desire desirable things once they're on the table.
(I picked an out-there example here, but the same reasoning might apply for a completely mundane intervention with legal ramifications. Suppose that "changing your legal name" or "moving houses" was this bold new concept that had only recently and tentatively been enshrined in law; not such crazy hypotheticals, both might be difficult to get across to an indentured medieval peasant. Let them know the option exists and I predict a lot of peasants would start to want to take it; and be happier once they had; which doesn't mean they had 'name-dysphoric' or 'house-dysphoric' written on their soul from birth, or that I've done them some great evil by broadening their horizons.)
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