Trigger warning: this is a very graphic response. In a bad frame of mind? Emotionally upset easily? Just don't read it.
The thing that conservatives don't understand is that if someone is clearly trans at 14 and they start taking puberty blockers and estrogen, they sometimes wind up looking like Kim Petras. Kim Petras sort of looks slightly trans, but mostly, she just looks like a hot chick. She will not have the same easy life a naturally born hot chick would, but it's going to be much much easier because of what happened when she was an early teenager.
Now let's say you wait until 18, because kids shouldn't be pushed into things. Now you have adams apples, larger brow ridges, and worst of all, there are different midface ratios you can't really correct even with surgery. At a certain point, even will all the estrogen and feminizing surgeries in the world, you will still look like a dude taking estrogen wearing makeup. A person in this situation will have a much harder life. The respectable and admirable Kaitlen Jenner is an example of someone who had tons of money and even then, the facial feminization with all the money in the world can't change certain ratios when someone transitions at a certain age.
Neither person "passes." Kim Petras from certain angles occasionally looks Trans. But if she wore conservative makeup and a conservative outfit, she could go somewhere and do something without getting mean dirty looks.
Do you know what it's like to get mean stares and glares all the time? If you are conservative, you don't. Any mean look inherently makes a person with any normal limbic system feel bad. Do you know how many dirty looks conservatives gives to different looking people every single day? All these conservatives talk about Bible this and Jesus that and protecting children this and that. A lot of children who feel trans blow their brains out, hang themselves, or jump of tall things once they are adults because they didn't get puberty blockers and estrogen before their face looked manly and it would require hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery to correct and the dirty looks and meanness wear them down and eventually, they are just done.
This is not about protecting children, it's about protecting conservative religious beliefs.
The conservative fear that some woke snowflake mom is going to push her confused depressed kid into chopping of his genitals and pretending to be a woman doesn't line up with reality and it's a flawed argument. Being trans is a hard and miserable road and no parent or kid wants it, it's something that happens, like cancer, that people deal with, but at least with cancer, you get sympathy from everyone, instead of your family disowning you if you are conservative.
I understand the "moderate" perspective on this, but you are totally wrong.
Except for the part about sports. Transgendered people just shouldn't be able to compete in sports or should have their own league. And liberals arguing otherwise detracts credibility from the much more important issue, which is trans kids should be able to get medical care before they get huge adams apples and brow ridges and longer midfaces and sharper cheekbones and wind up much more likely to commit suicide.
The more important part of the equation is being able to use puberty blockers and take estrogen prior to developing even more manly characteristics. Genital surgery could be done as an adult, but that's not actually what conservatives want, they want no medication intervention before 18.
If there are concerns about making young teens who are confused infertile, then conservative religitards can subsidize these people freezing their eggs or sperm, but the reality is not that many people change their minds on this. For every random YouTube special filmed by a hardcore catholic showing a schizophrenic female who regrets lopping off her breasts, you have thousands of women who are now trans men who are less likely to die, but the Catholic documentary filmmakers don't add that in, do they?
Conservatives often point to the horrors of the surgeries. They are horrific. Sometimes if someone reverses their penis and scrotum, hair can grow on the inside of their constructed "vagina" and the whole thing is horrific. But the math is evident: the trans people who do these surgeries are less likely to blow their heads off.
People act like this is an ivory tower debate, but really it's often there are 2 outcomes: outcome 1 is that Billy with a large browridge, adam's apple, and manly cheeks, who doesn't have 150,000 for facial feminization surgery, lays down in front of train tracks at 19 and splat, OR Billy takes puberty blockers and estrogen at 13, becomes Billie, and ends up marrying a mathmatician who doesn't want to have children for some reason and they live happily ever after despite being an unusual couple.
The fake empathy and outrage Christians have neglects to look at the statistics and the actual outcomes and relies on the availability heuristic/bias to make assumptions. It's all fine and well to do such ivory tower debates, unless you're the transgender teen who ends up dead because of it.
Can we compromise? No trans people in sports and trans people have their own unique prison or cell block and young teens can take puberty blockers and estrogen so they don't need to try to pay 150,000 in facial feminization plastic surgery at 18 or 19, money of which they can only get quickly from sex work and not going to school? Sound like a good compromise?