> why would the relevance of those who don't wish to have a procedure, be relevant to the happiness of those who undergo it?

I was about to write a whole paragraph about control groups but you can do it by yourself: https://www.britannica.com/science/control-group

In particular: "It is important that every aspect of the experimental environment be as alike as possible for all subjects in the experiment. If conditions are different for the experimental and control groups, it is impossible to know whether differences between groups are actually due to the difference in treatments or to the difference in environment."

> Secondly, plenty research is funded by "multi-billion industry," or government, or defense.

Yes and it has created the "publish or perish" culture which then caused the reproducibility crisis. But that's not the issue here. The real issue is when the funders have a vested financial (and political) interest in one result over the other. The pharmaceutical industry is getting successfully sued years after years for billions of dollars over this kind of stuff. Conflict of interest is a real concern for scientific studies especially in the non-exact sciences.

> Given how unhappy trans people can be prior to transitioning, if someone did somehow go through the significant hoops needed to transition, and eventually feel the need to detransition -- which is exceedingly rare -- they detransition, they don't just live miserably and accept a "sunk-cost fallacy." That's ridiculous.

"If X then surely Y"... You make a lot of statements without backing it up. AFAIK there are no proper studies that has been done on a significant long term lowering of suicide-rates after medical transitioning before adulthood. And you mix up de-transitioning (which is actually impossible to achieve considering the irreversible effects) with the comparison of not transitioning because study (and others) didn't have a control group.

> As for the hand wavy "the trans activists" boogeyman, please cite sources of researchers in academia being "afraid of opposing" them -- and evidence of who "the trans activists" you're referring to, actually are.

It's not "hand waving". There are many examples of when researcher's results portray medical transitioning as a net negative then they face backlash, forced retraction and loss of funding or face character assassination from news articles and social media.

https://4thwavenow.com/tag/petition-plos-one-brown-universit...
https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2021/01/21/oxford-union-critic...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7683207/Researcher-...

And if you've been around academia in the recent years then you know this is the case. Being on the bad side of the trans-activists means no funding, no chair and worse.

> The only issue in academia is so-called "gender critical" academics invalidating the existence of trans people, often violating academic policy in refusing to respect their existence,

You prove my previous point... They are "an issue" to be skeptical of gender theory and its applications. If they do not agree, they are "invalidating their existence".

> then shouting loudly when they get called out on it.

You mean like this: https://youtu.be/vMSmUzDt-7U

> Nobody is refusing to research or publish because of fear

Fear is a strong force when the threat is obviously real. Notice how you have to claim that the suppression of academics doesn't exist because you know it's wrong and then flag them as "an issue" and "denying of their existence" by "violating academic policy" at the same time.

> there isn't some cabal of trans people trying to silence academia

If I showed you cabals of people chasing down professors off campus for their views regarding gender would you change your mind?