https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1samgjl/former_glaad_president_we_were_wrong_to/
The reason this was a disaster waiting to happen is actually quite straightforward. The arguments that were being made for this by advocates were using data from 20 years ago. What they failed to account for was that "trans kids" were vanishingly rare in the 2000s and before. It was a small, idiosyncratic group of patients. This was the group for whom the backing of medical and scientific institutions for their model of gender-affirming care was basing their data on.
That completely failed to account for what subsequently happened, which was that being "trans" became a cultural fad in the 2010s. Trans identification increased fiftyfold within the span of ten years, mostly among girls. For a variety of reasons, adolescent girls are particularly susceptible to peer pressure and group influence. This leads to things like (for example) increased discussion of and exposure to the concept of anorexia, causing an increase in adolescent girls having anorexia. Teens using TikTok who were being continually recommended content around Tourettes suddenly started developing tics. Everything seemed to point towards this sudden, sharp increase in reports of gender dysphoria being caused by social media exposure and peer influence.
But many in the medical community refused (often deliberately) to account for this. So they were treating teenagers following a trend with the same playbook they employed for children who had expressed strong symptoms of gender dysphoria since their early years. The typical adolescent patient who was receiving 'gender-affirming care' in 2019 fit a very, very different psychological profile from one in 2009 or 1999. They assumed the results would remain consistent because they refused to account for the additional factors causing a spike in claimed cases of gender dysphoria. This was - if nothing else - highly reckless and irresponsible.
