Okay... Even assuming you can change sex (which you can't) and assuming there is legitimate gender dysphoria for all that claim to be 'trans', why is transitioning seen as the best solution? Something so drastic and dangerous (even if you ignore the cosmetic surgeries, cross sex hormones are dangerous in itself especially a life time supplement).
Nordic countries are rightfully pulling back on treating underage kids:
https://nypost.com/2024/02/24/opinion/a-finnish-study-is-changing-how-we-approach-trans-kids/
https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e300940.full
Also amore recent study that shows people are twelve times more likely to commit suicide AFTER gender affirming surgery
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38699117/
No one is ever born in the wrong body. Dysphoria if anything is a mental health condition similar to anorexia. And we do not affirm anorexics by endorsing their delusions do we? There are other ways to help and fix those people. And no this 'fix' is not conversion therapy. Helping them accept their body isn't a conversion, on the other hand some Muslim countries do use 'transitioning' in order to 'fix' gay people (most of the time gay males cause females are too important to castrate)
(This ask covers a lot of ground so I'll try to address it all, but if there's something I miss that you want my comment on feel free to send a follow-up ask.)
What you're calling "legitimate gender dysphoria" is caused by a mismatch in what sex characteristics the body has, versus what sex characteristics the brain expects to have. Research supports this, showing that not only do dysphoric trans people's brains have a unique phenotype compared to cisgender members of their same sex, but that the brain areas that most differ from their cisgender counterparts are the ones responsible for body image and perception of self. All this meaning that Gender Incongruence -- the condition of the brain's expectation of the body not matching the body's natal sex characteristics -- is an innate neurological state that results in a physical inability to recognize one's natural sexed traits as part of the self.
"Dysphoria" is the label for the distress caused by this condition. So while Gender Dysphoria is technically a mental health condition, it is itself a symptom of Gender Incongruence, which is a physical health condition fixed in-utero and cannot be changed by outside influences. Because we can't alter the brain's innate (mis)understanding of the sex of the body, treating Gender Incongruence is done by changing the sex characteristics of the body instead, and this type of treatment is proven to be extraordinarily effective at reducing feelings of dysphoria and improving overall quality of life, with extremely low rates of regret.
All medical interventions -- noting here that what you're calling "cosmetic surgeries" are also medical interventions, because they have proven health benefits and are one of the only known effective treatments for Gender Incongruence/Dysphoria -- carry risk and are carried out only when the benefit to the patient is deemed to outweigh it, whether you're talking about transgender healthcare or not. The position of experts in the field is that blockers and HRT are safe when properly administered and monitored, and that the potential improvements to transgender people's quality of life outweigh potential risks. They emphasize the importance of transition-related interventions being considered medically necessary, while agreeing with you that the approach should be conservative, because we still have large gaps to fill in our understanding of the mechanisms and long-term effects.
That study of suicide risk (linking to the full text) leaves out a very crucial distinction in its data, which unfortunately makes its conclusion foregone: It's comparing people who had gender-affirming surgeries to people who did not, not trans people who had gender-affirming surgeries to trans people who did not. It's already well-known that trans people (regardless of their transition status) have much higher suicide rates than the general population, so if the GA surgery group was composed of all trans individuals and the non-GA-surgery group was not, obviously the group with more trans people is going to have a higher overall suicide rate. There is no evidence that gender-affirming surgeries caused their suicidality, just that getting gender-affirming surgery is correlated with being part of a population with an already-high suicide rate -- which that article was corrected to specify.
Gender dysphoria also cannot be handled as we do dysmorphia in cases of anorexia nervosa, because they are fundamentally etiologically different. Dysmorphia refers to the distress caused by an incorrect perception of the body (e.g. an anorexic woman distressed by seeing her body as fat, even if it objectively is not), and a fixation on it as a "flaw" that needs to be corrected. In gender dysphoria, however, the problem is that sufferers perceive their bodies correctly (e.g. a trans woman distressed by seeing her body with male sex characteristics, which she objectively does have), and the distress occurs because their bodies have traits that they are neurologically incapable of integrating with their self-knowledge. In which case, changing the incongruent sex characteristics directly addresses the source of distress and results in significant mental health improvements -- compared to anorexia, with which the source of the stress is not actually body, but the obsession with a mental distortion.
Finally, in Iran gay men are forced to transition to female for their survival, in order to avoid persecution for their sexuality. This is a form of homophobic oppression that deserves its own attention outside of conversations about medically-necessary healthcare for trans people, as the two groups have vastly different reasons for pursuing sex reassignment and it is not helpful to either to conflate them with each other.
