Has it occurred to you that you're the one that is "late" or has outdated views on this issue? Several European countries have changed their guidance on the treatment of minors presenting with gender dysphoria (England, Finland, Sweden) because of the huge spike in children presenting with gender issues over the past decade, and a complete reversal in the demographics of this population. Children with what used to be called Gender Identity Disorder used to be disproportionately male and rare. Now, the vast majority of kids are females who had no indication of gender issues until adolescence. Many have comorbid mental health disorders and histories of trauma, though some are simply surrounded by peers who also identify as trans. This clustering of cases would be very unusual if being trans was a fixed trait. Trans identification is also associated with autism spectrum disorders.
In fact, I know somebody currently doing a study on trauma in LGBTQ females, and their entire worldview was upended by what they found. Several study participants who identified as trans reported histories of sexual trauma followed by disgust at their own female bodies. Many had autistic traits. I'm not saying that trans people never experience abuse or discrimination, but I am saying that causal arrows often point in the other direction: trauma leads to trans identification. Lots of clinicians have observed this phenomenon in recent years and are distrubed by the recommendations of major medical associations and psychological associatons to affirm gender identity, often at the expense of treating the root causes of dysphoria. It's one thing to argue that grown adults ought to be allowed to take hormones and get surgery, even if their gender dysphoria is linked to abuse and traume, quite another to greenlight double mastectomy and testosterone for abused girls, or even girls who are experiending normal adolescent identity exploration. The same applies to boys, many of whom are on the autism spectrum.
You dismiss Maher for his crack about having once wanted to be a pirate, but that doesn't discredit his point: identity exploration is a normal part of childhood and adolescence. The argument that children know that they're trans is completely out of step with knowledge about child development. Imagine somebody locking you into a childhood identification for the rest of your life. Historically, most children with gender identity issues were found to outgrow the conviction that they were born the wrong sex; many went on to identify as gay or lesbian. Treating this early cross-sex identificaiton as a fixed trait rather than a child's way of making sense of their own gender nonconformity and nascent homosexuality amounts to "transing the gay away." This is medical experimentation on would-be gay kids, kids with mental health problems, trauma survivors, and females who are dealing with normal pubertal discomfort.
This is the medical scandal of our lifetimes.
My last point will be about "trans" as a type of person. While there have been people across history and in different cultures who live in the social role of the opposite sex and/or fashion their bodies to resemble the opposite sex, the current understanding of trans as "born in the wrong body," is a recent mostly-American phenomenon. Not only that, but the things that lead people to cross-sex presentation differ across cultures. Male homosexuality is a very common correlate. The belief that transness is an inborn or fixed trait is mistaken. Trans is a cultural category; in the US context it is also political.
This is where things get really bad. The "born in the wrong body" narrative is accompanied by an even more pernicious narrative--that sex itself is entirely an effect of oppressive power structures. Current trans activism does not simply argue that some people are born trans and ought to be protected from discrimination; it argues that biological sex itself is a social construct and that people who believe in the existence of males and females as distinct types of people have a form of false consciousness. You can see this in the use of the word "cis." Cis does not refer to people who have not undergone a course of cross-sex hormones and surgery; it denotes people who "identify with the social roles associated with their sex assigned at birth." And, identifying with the cis heteropatriarchy means that one has been duped by hegemonic power structures. The only way to be enlightened is to identify out of it. Young people understand this intuitively. This is why a college of mine's daugther (a 7th grader) was told that being "straight" was homophobic.
NERunner03533, you have bought into a political cult--one that has swept up much of the political left in the US--you just don't realize it. This isn't ultimately an issue of civil rights for an oppressed minority, it's about a quasi-religious, misogynist way of thinking that has captured major institutions while harming children and eroding women's rights.
