On the trope that trans people are repressed cis gay people with internalized homophobia

There's a common trope that most trans people are gay people trying to become straight, and would not be interested in changing their gender, were it not for the pressures of homophobia, and thus are not authentically transgender. This is just a false nonsense assertion that I've repeatedly argued against.

I note how it's deployed here:

— On the broadview.news site: "Gay, not trans: A powerful challenge to gender medicalisation enters the political mainstream." Feb 7, 2024.

The idea is that, if your "early" experiences aren't sexual in a certain way, you won't be able to feel, assert, or establish a different sexual orientation later in life.

It's a surprising claim, because of course people can generally reevaluate their feelings and experiences at any age. If feelings can be reassessed at all, there's no reason to assume they're age-dependent.

And the claim is homophobic in several ways:

• Cis gay people can come out as gay later in life. The timing of their coming-out experiences shouldn't be denied.
• Trans gay people exist. Their existence shouldn't be denied. Furthermore, the argument, when applied to them, shows up in reverse: it implies that they should have been prevented from transitioning to give them a chance to be straight, which surely sounds homophobic.
• Bisexuality seems to be erased from this discussion.
• It seems to rely on a very old "corruption of the youth" assumption about how kids turn into gay adults, i.e., if they're not allowed to be gay when they're young, they won't end up as gay adults.

There's also an inappropriate fixation on the idea that children need to have "decisive [sexual] experiences" that, in this example, the children in question have specifically said they do not want to have. The children don't need to be encouraged to have a gay development, nor a straight development, whatever that means, as long as the child is asserting that they do not want that kind of sexual experience (as they did not ask for it) and are instead more interested in gender transition.

Wasn't mysterious to these people in 1999

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