Alright, hang on there for a minute. I joined because I think I could have something to contribute here. I can understand the perspective that Beautiful Tragedy here states. Yes, it's not easy to question it as it can quite easily be interpreted as an insult. What you have to understand that it is difficult to explain, but I think I've come up with an apt comparison, although it might sound a bit crazy.
Say someone's engineering a car. The engineer decides from the get-go that they're going with a four-cylinder engine, which is appropriate for a car that is small or mid-sized, or a compact pickup. But then, like a total pillock, the engineer builds the vehicle's drive-train, body, frame, and other components like a mid-to-large size pickup. Now, it's capable of functioning yes, but every time it does so it struggles. Simply moving can be a chore, but the work expected of it is quite often excruciating. The engine has nothing wrong with it from the get go: it's fully functional, as is the body. But paired together, they fail to synchronize. The engine is the heart, soul, and the brain in this metaphor, and the body and drive-train are the body of the individual.
What causes this phenomena is largely unknown, but its existence is irrefutable. Some say it's a variation in the genetic code or a lack of a certain hormone wash during development in the womb. We don't know for sure. But that's not the most important thing here.
I know how it feels because I, like Beautiful Tragedy, never made the choice. It made itself. Comfort is not as much a thought as it is a feeling. You can change your thoughts, but your feelings are much less malleable. And a feeling of dysphoria is one that does not change at will. It's like your base attractions: if you are a heterosexual man, you feel attracted to women. It's not something you'd be able to change just by saying "Okay I'm gay now" and then automatically feeling attracted to men. It doesn't work that way. I can't change the fact that I feel extremely uncomfortable as a man, I just do. And the depression it causes has on two occasions almost killed me, once by a Colt 1911 clone, and the other via an overdose of Oxycontin. The gender transition is arguably the safest and best option: it allows one to feel comfort in oneself, and washes away the negative feelings that naturally come with a lifelong dysphoria. It's here that I believe that what Beautiful Tragedy said is like removing a birth defect or a cancerous tumor: it's like removing something that eats away at you and has eaten away at you for your entire life. It's like removing a paralyzing feedback loop from a computer system, or a parasite from a dog's stomach. It frees you.
I agree that current treatment is quite far from perfect: yeah, there are things that plastic surgery and hormones just can't cover up. The problem with your proposition though is that it is impossible to improve the procedures without acknowledging the problem in the first place: consider us the prototypes if you will, the precursors to the type of treatment you propose. We are the stepping stones, the trailblazers heading into otherwise unexplored territory. You rarely succeed without a few failures behind you, and this is no exception.
