“Even back then there was a lot of media and the thought of being a women was exciting”
I’m sorry for your difficult upbringing, but this does not meet the criteria of gender dysphoria AT ALL. No serious physician would allow you as a teenager or adult to transition based on this.
Also, we know that over sexualized behaviour is unfortunately common in children who suffered abuse. But to conflate this with LBGT or specifically trans issues is heinous, one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
I’m not personally offended, don’t worry. I’m not part of the LGBT community myself, back when I was studying I looked into the literature around transition and the perceived hot controversy on the issue. You’ve touched on an important issue, which is that a large percentage of people who will end up transitioning have a lot of stressors which will end up severely impacting their mental health, not just the innate stress from gender dysphoria, but the lack of support from friends and family, ostracization, etc.
This helps explain the psychiatric comorbidities, like depressive and anxiety disorders.
It seems to me that the current medical pathway for trans patients is robust, and should weed out the odd patient with transient dysphoria or patients which have serious psychiatric issues that mistakenly led them down this path.
For those that go down the path, regret rates seem to always be between 1 and 2 per cent. At this point, we can accept these rates as statistically accurate, when we have data from thousands of individuals.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01605-w#Abs1
https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/03000/regret_after_gender_affirmation_surgery__a.22.aspx