No no, I don't take it as a personal attack - though I really don't think my position has much to do with the popular position.
My main point is that the term gender dysphoria is really just descriptive - it says that the person feels alienated from his body, specifically with reference to his gender. It doesn't say that this means he is really in the wrong body, or should have surgery to correct it, or anything like that; any more than a person convinced her body is deformed and ugly should have plastic surgery to correct it.
AFAIK, the best way to actually help such people is debated among the medical community, and really none of the solutions offered are very good - the people still feel pretty awful and out of place, or they end up putting their bodies through the wringer and of course are still not fitting in to society well. But if medicine is going to figure out what causes such things and if and how it is possible to help such people, it is going to need a name for the problem. Gender dysphoria is pretty neutral and fits in with other terms used for similar problems.
Of course their are philosophical issues - what makes us a man or woman? Our body, or mind/brain, or our DNA? Presumably our soul is a man or woman's soul, but it is not, alas, visible to us. The others - well, it seems the answer can depend. This kind of issue is the sort of thing that really requires people to have a good grasp of both medical science and also theology to talk about in a helpful way, and I think that is something that may be missing in the Church to some extent - though the Catholics have been good at trying to do this in an organized way.
I've sometimes thought that part of the problem for people suffering from this may be that our ideas about gender roles are actually quite fixed and sometimes extreme. If we expect people to be very manly or womanly in their presentation of themselves, I am sure it makes it much more difficult for those who can't really identify with those things. Especially when they are then suspected of some sort of sexual immorality. OUr century has asked a lot of questions around issues with regard to sexuality, and the response of some Christians has been to become very hard-line. Which is appropriate about some things. But as far as demanding adherence to popular sex roles, it can cause problems, because our bodies are not always perfect. (And of course sometimes we think that sex roles include things that are really just conventions.)
Sorry about the delay, and that my response is somewhat "stream-of-consciousness" due to the desire to consider each of your thoughts - I could probably rewrite this as a holistic essay, but don't have the energy.
I do get your main point, and agree that it IS a description. In trying to filter through what we agree on, what I come to is that we do agree that "gender dysphoria" is a description, and that help ought to be offered for what is granted to be a genuine problem.
The first fact about the medical community is that most of it is very far from traditional Christian faith, and that the philosophy with which it approaches medicine is increasingly materialistic - my general impression is that people believe that God and spiritual reality (as anything actually TRUE) can be completely dispensed with. That immediately makes the solutions of such a community highly suspect. They will only be right and work insofar as they align with the truth that we are created beings with souls (even if they deny those truths). I already said that a solution to this problem that excludes Christ and treats us as exclusively material beings is not a solution at all, and I'm assuming that you are a believer and would agree with that. If not, we'd have to speak on a different level.
So when you say that the best way to help such people is debated among the medical community
of course it is! They dont even agree on what truth is; what the nature of man is and so on. How could they agree about what is to us self-evidently a problem of the soul what are we to say when the body is completely and evidently a normal female (or male) body? The first evidence that they are confused is that they do not look at a girl like Chaz and say She is a girl. I shouldnt even have to say anything about the modern insanity that has the media identifying people as whatever sex they
want to be. And everybody obediently falls into line, like sheep. (I think thats connected to the wild success of public schools in their real mission the crippling of genuinely independent and critical thought.) But thats what Satan does he sews lies and confusion, so that we should not see the truth.
When you say that such people do not fit well into society Id encourage thinking through exactly what that means. To me it sounds like media cant a half-baked thought, popular and oft repeated but not completely defined or thought-out. It is evident to me that the best you can say is that the problem of fitting is entirely on their side not societys. We do not need to reshape society to fit their deformed perception; we need to teach them to work on their perception; in a word, to change themselves or at least strive to; not to change social attitudes to make their feelings the new norm which is what IS being done. To fit here is an incredibly subjective and undefined term. If I demand definition, arguments quickly break down and we are left with what the person feels and feelings are not a basis on which to establish objective truth. (It should be given that all should fit to the image of Christ, and that while we all fail at this, we are called to do so and the homosexual is no exception. And that, again, does not mean that we are to specially judge the sin of Sodom over others only that we should not allow its praise and uplifting.
It ought to be obvious to even the most casually educated person that everything we are in the physical realm is based on our DNA. They are not separate things, as your dichotomy seems to treat them. It really is a final proof of the wrongness of the feeling when we find that Chaz is xx and not xy. It ends the physical argument. Youre back to a spiritual problem which MDs cant fix, and their meddling in a realm that is not at all their competency is abominable. None of that requires extensive medical knowledge to either see or discuss I refuse to submit my reason exclusively to experts, although I do believe that there is such a thing as expertise and that it has its place but if the expert himself sees the world in a radically wrong way, how far should I trust his knowledge? Again, I can only trust it where it aligns with what is actually true. So I dont think that kind of thing is missing at all in the Church, and actually is a problem in the Catholic Church. Sure, if given x, then y follows, but if x is wrong from the get-go, then y is even more wrong. If the philosophy is wrong, then the science is wrong because its aimed in the wrong direction. In our case it is the domination of materialism, which denied spiritual explanations for such illnesses it must (by the internal logic) insist that the causes are also material, and not spiritual.
Ive already spoken about language, and the philosophical wrongness of using the word gender something that everyone has docilely submitted to despite the fact that our grandparents would have thought you were talking about grammar but again, they do it, I think, because they have been trained to. This in turn has enabled thinking that treats the sexes as a social construct for that is what gender itself is, as opposed to sex, which is an absolute physical reality.
Im not sure why we should be concerned about people who cant identify with manliness or womanliness, or why the exception should be allowed to determine the rule. Or rather, I am quite clear that we should not. Nor do I accuse them of immorality. Feelings are not actions in Orthodoxy. There are people who suffer from same-sex attraction who repent of their actions and strive not to act on their feelings, and are so not guilty of immorality which is a matter of action, not feeling, who will get into the Kingdom before me.
The reason the response of Christians has become hard-line is because questions based on false presuppositions have been raised with insane answers.
Appropriate is another example of modern usage because it is entirely subjective it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean it can be used for anything the speaker thinks right. Of course its not a new word, but our ancestors said right/wrong, not in/appropriate on these matters, and the latter adjective was used for things like fashion, which really are subjective, and so appropriate really is appropriate to those things. But if we follow the modern logic, then we must allow people to
walk naked on the streets of San Francisco, and are left arguing about whether it is appropriate for them to plant their naked butts on public seating or not, because it is no longer wrong, but merely inappropriate.
I think the problem of your own perception of what is hard-line arises when speaking of the idea of roles of the sexes. (Note that if I rephrase popular terms, I am forced to think about them if I simply repeat them, I do not apply much thought at all.) Roles are not generally the issue, although a person may be uncomfortable doing something, and that feeling may be based on genuine concerns or merely taste. But if a little girl doesnt want to play with dolls, a) obviously she shouldnt be forced to, and b) there is something obviously unusual about that girl. A Christian view and approach would condemn any behavior that was hurtful or demeaning to the child, so complaints about that are an argument against un-Christian behavior, not for calling the girl a boy. In any event, I do not propose imposing forced sex roles, so that question is moot. If Chaz likes to play with cars, let her play with cars! Just don't tell her she's "a boy trapped in a girl's body". And when we've gotten to the point where everyone calls her "he", then we've reached "The Emperor's New Clothes".
All we need now is the little boy shouting out the truth - hopefully, it'll bring the people back to their senses and the naked people scurrying back home to cover themselves up.