The RCTs that validate your assertion (or mine) when comparing reparative therapy and affirmation do not exist. All that we have to rely on now is the overwhelming consensus among medical and mental health professionals, and that consensus appears to exist among major reputable bodies worldwide, and is based on their many decades of collective clinical experience and research.

If medical bodies are changing guidelines without basing on it solid studies and evidence, then those medical bodies should be considered compromised and corrupt. Especially when that treatments involving treatments that will permanently sterilize minors. If they are not following the evidence, then they are not "experts" or "scientists" they are ideological fanatics wearing the skin-suit of science.

In following the transgender issue, what I have noticed is that doctors who take the common sense approach, "Your child has a penis, he is a boy, you need to reinforce that and he will get over it" don't make any money. They do not open "gender identity clinics" because there is no money in dispensing common sense. The doctors who tell parents to "let the child explore their gender" and "let's help solidify their transgender identity" prolong the problem and create a recurring revenue stream for themselves. Then, because these doctors are the "head of a gender identity clinic serving thousands of children" these same doctors are the one's who are put in charge of writing the standard of care and the guidelines. It is totally perverse set of incentives.

I'd recommend reading up on how the sausage is made in coming up with the "consensus":

https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/gender-medicines-citatio...

https://www.nysun.com/article/leaked-files-from-influential-...

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "other cases" that are directly comparable with gender dysphoria, and can you find some studies that support the effectiveness of this approach?

If someone was too short, or too tall, or thought they were black (even though they were unambiguously white),

You appear to start from your biology and work backwards, as if the mind does not exist.

No, I don't believe that mind and body exist as wholly separate entities. This is very obvious in the case of sex where the hormones emitted by my testicles very clearly have all kinds of effects on my mind.

> It's actually really difficult for me to understand how a person's fundamental well-being is intrinsically and immalleably tied to names and clothing.
>
> > What you are saying here is that "this is my experience and I do not understand why everyone else does not have the same experience".

No, what I'm saying it is difficult to even see how an immalleabile tie between well-being and wearing a dress could have possibly evolved, when clothing has been so different throughout human history and people are thus obviously very flexible in the type of clothes they can wear.

What you are saying here is that "this is my experience and I do not understand why everyone else does not have the same experience". Do you not see a problem with that?

Until a mind reading machine exists, that is all that any of us can do. I have read various accounts of trans-people's experiences and I am not convinced that there is some immalleable preference in their mind that makes them female internally. Certainly some men have a very strong desire to act out the role of female, but that is different there actually being female in the brain. But because of the way various medical guidelines works, and the law works, there is incentive to lie about this.