"You shouldn't have to hate yourself to be transgender."
This statement is often said as an argument against transmedicalism-- the idea that stating that transgender people have a medical condition somehow promotes trans suffering. But that's a gross misrepresentation.
There are two aspects to how this rhetoric is incorrect. Firstly, it posits that any person with gender dysphoria/incongruence merely hates themself, and that they simply need to accept their body as it is and stop complaining. However, hatred of one’s body does not translate to hatred of the self. Saying that trans people can simply think away dysphoria implies that dysphoria is purely a mental shortcoming, even though there are multiple scientific studies proving that idea wrong. There is a significant neurological basis for gender dysphoria-- one that cannot be thought away.
Secondly, the trans community isn't built on suffering, it's built on helping people recover from suffering. If the point was just to promote suffering, we wouldn't be advocating for medical transition at all. There's not really a reason to center a community based on recovery on people who don't need to recover from anything. That doesn't mean that people need to force themselves to have dysphoria. They just don't have to identify with the community, and there's nothing wrong with that.
