I think you're jumping to conclusions --- my reading of GP is that "the cause" == dysphoria.
Conversion therapists like Ken Zucker know full well about gender dysphoria and helped create the old "gender identity disorder" diagnosis in DSM IV. The "conversion" they are trying to achieve is to change the child's gender identity so that it's congruent with their sex via conversion therapy. This has failed spectacularly time and time again, and yet, prejudice against trans people, keeps folks interested in "treating" gender dysphoria in this manner.
There was an article on Zucker and his practices in 2008.
https://www.npr.org/2008/05/07/90247842/two-families-grapple...
What it comes down to is just punishing gender non-conforming behavior. Kids treated in this way have been prone to commit suicide as adults, or, to transition anyway but then have to deal with a lifetime of ridicule for having the marks of a male puberty on their body. Outing them as transgender at a glance, whereas if they'd have had access to gender affirming care they'd have been able to blend in and, you know, go buy milk at the store without being gawked at or harassed.
Yes, I was pointing out how the conversion therapy works. I know lots of happy feminine gay men and butch gay women for example, but they don't have gender dysphoria. Trans people aren't the same as feminine gay men or butch gay women.
Zucker himself, whose conversion therapy included punishing boys for playing with barbies, said he supported the idea of someone being a feminine man and saw his therapy as a way of achieving that. He would straight up tell parents that their children would most likely be gay, but that being gay was better than being trans.
So, ironically, we have a conversion therapy, where the aim was to turn trans kids gay. I guess they thought that if you punished gender non-conformity early on you could instill a sense of maleness or femaleness into a kid, and then later they could just be more femme or butch as they liked. Sick stuff.
If the transgender identity is innate, why are there so many detransitioners coming out recently? Something has clearly gone very wrong.
Even among those of us who detrans (on the order of magnitude of 1%), at least 95% do so not because they were wrong, but because coming out invited reprisals which made their life too difficult to continue (losing home, family, job, etc.) The first study I was able to find puts that proportion at 97.6%. [0] My Fermi estimate puts your "so many" at one in 5000 or so.
Many homophobes have made "medical" arguments about why sodomy should be banned. Aids was seen as a "gay disease" and as proof of how homosexuality caused and spread diseases. A good friend of mine's mother refused to have her hair done by a gay man in our small town because she said she was scared he may cut his hand while cutting her hair and give her hepatitis or aids (what's more, she was a nurse).
Beyond that, pathologization of gender non-conformity is why homosexuality was classed as an illness until relatively recently, and it's been a common source of medicalized discrimination shared by gay and trans people.
> why are there so many detransitioners coming out recently
Because the same few are being trotted about by conservative media outlets and political action committees to stir up hate.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-detransitioner-fights-anti-...
good info here too:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/media-s-detransition...
A study showing the rate of desistance in trans youth, using more recent cohorts, showing that it still hovers around 2% where it has basically always been:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S188898912...
tl;dr 98% of trans youth are well served by receiving medical care and 2% are not. Conservative media blows up coverage on the 2% in order to try to ban treatment for that other 98% instead of doing the sane and humane thing, which would be to try to screen out more of the 2% from getting care and allowing that 98% live happy lives.
The number of trans kids doubled from 2017-2020[0]
Do you think that’s organic change?
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teena...
No, we'll look at what's happening today the same way we look at the satanic panic or the lavender panic in the 80's - the groups against gay rights were even named things like "Save the Children" which mirrors the rhetoric today where people falsely claim that transgender people are "turning" children trans despite all evidence pointing to transgender identity being something innate.
> As usual, those people are trying to address the symptoms, not the cause.
This comment implies that you support conversion therapy. Conversion therapy has been tried, in every possible fashion, and has never worked. It is functionally just torture that leaves people shattered emotionally and sometimes physically. Supporting it is inhumane.