I think that the alternative, letting the wrong puberty run its course and risk severe suicidal ideation and lifelong self-image issues is much worse than not addressing the issue, citing “misdiagnoses” as the reason.

Christian-supremacist social authoritarians are the ones pushing transphobia in the US and elsewhere, and they always like to bring up the “what if the kids are just going through a phase and make a wrong choice and regret it later…” angle. It’s a bad-faith argument because they fundamentally do not believe it is ever possible for being transgender and transitioning to be the correct choice. For anyone, ever.

Their position is that all trans people are wrong and crazy and sick, and need to be saved by Jesus to come back to the truth that they are actually cisgender like everybody else in the world. Because they deny the existence of trangender people as a real thing, it’s something made up by Satanic perverts and cultural Marxists. Ideally kids never even find out trans is even a thing, because it would be illegal to talk about it. Failing that, they need to be psychologically tortured at a pray-the-gay-away conversion camp. If they still can’t be made normal, they need to be disowned and discarded; the woke mind virus got them.

You can chart up the statistics, here’s how many adults regret trying to transition as a teen, versus here’s how many adults regret not being allowed to transition sooner. Doesn’t matter. None of the people in the latter column “count”. It’s similar to trying to show how few instances of voter fraud there are vs. how many people are disenfranchised by voter ID laws. They don’t really care about the research, the logic, the fairness, the math. They care that their side is the only right one and that the only people being hurt are the others.

Also I believe conservative men want for transfem kids in particular to go through the ‘wrong’ puberty because it makes them easier to spot. The majority of their own sexual experiences are one-night hookups with drunk strangers. So they fear accidentally mistaking one for a “real woman”, because if they did that would make them gay. No, they want trans women to stay as a PornHub category where they belong.

They care more about that than teens killing themselves, because that’s just what being a right-winger is. The absolute selfishness is as core to conservative identity as the bigotry.

The wheels have fallen off some time ago but the bottom has not yet worn through from dragging it up to the curb each week.