Using medical procedures to get your body where you want it is cool and good. Like, I take hormones and I desperately want bottom surgery, that's not the issue.
The issue is that a lot of cis people view transness as predominantly a medical "issue" and have set up gatekeeping around that, which causes a lot of trans people to internalize that way of thinking. As in, you are not Normal and we're going to graciously allow you medical procedures to allow you to get as close to Normal as possible (and in many cases and especially before 2011, not even that in the vast majority of cases). Gender Dysphoria is in the DSM, it's categorized as a mental disorder- the fact that transition is currently accepted as the most effective "treatment" doesn't change the fundamental issues of that framing.
The old gatekeeping makes this abundantly clear. Like, a trans woman could lose her hormones back then if she ever wore pants to a doctor's appointment or if the doctor found out she wasn't straight or if she didn't want to do what we now call going stealth. Because the goal was taking somebody "deviant" and making them as not deviant as possible. And this is also where we get hierarchies like AGP and HSTS- which is to say, hierarchies of good assimilationist trans people who can be tentatively allowed to transition in a single prescribed way and bad deviant trans people who are probably faking their transness and must be denied the ability to transition- which were and are formalized and treated seriously by psychologists (albeit less now than they used to be).
Which matter? Transness being seen as a disease?
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Using medical procedures to get your body where you want it is cool and good. Like, I take hormones and I desperately want bottom surgery, that's not the issue.
The issue is that a lot of cis people view transness as predominantly a medical "issue" and have set up gatekeeping around that, which causes a lot of trans people to internalize that way of thinking. As in, you are not Normal and we're going to graciously allow you medical procedures to allow you to get as close to Normal as possible (and in many cases and especially before 2011, not even that in the vast majority of cases). Gender Dysphoria is in the DSM, it's categorized as a mental disorder- the fact that transition is currently accepted as the most effective "treatment" doesn't change the fundamental issues of that framing.
The old gatekeeping makes this abundantly clear. Like, a trans woman could lose her hormones back then if she ever wore pants to a doctor's appointment or if the doctor found out she wasn't straight or if she didn't want to do what we now call going stealth. Because the goal was taking somebody "deviant" and making them as not deviant as possible. And this is also where we get hierarchies like AGP and HSTS- which is to say, hierarchies of good assimilationist trans people who can be tentatively allowed to transition in a single prescribed way and bad deviant trans people who are probably faking their transness and must be denied the ability to transition- which were and are formalized and treated seriously by psychologists (albeit less now than they used to be).
Does this make sense/answer your question?