Being trans is a trauma response like self-harm
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“Sometimes you may experience some sort of trauma, which means that you wanna disassociate from whatever you are. And if you can do that by saying, "Well, I'm no longer that person, I'm a, I'm the opposite sex," I, I kind of get that. There's all sorts of things that people do. They might starve themselves, they can cut themselves, and they might decide that they're, they're the opposite sex.”
There is a real clinical literature on the co-occurrence of gender dysphoria with other mental health conditions, and the idea that distress can manifest in different ways sounds like it is drawing on genuine psychology.
Gender incongruence is a stable aspect of identity that has been documented across cultures and throughout recorded history, long before the specific traumas any individual might experience. What the research consistently shows is that where trans people experience higher rates of mental health difficulties, those difficulties trace back to minority stress, family rejection, discrimination, and barriers to care, not to gender identity itself being a symptom of damage. The co-occurrence of distress and trans identity does not make one the cause of the other, any more than the distress a gay teenager experiences under a hostile family proves that being gay is a trauma response. When a young trans person is told their identity is simply a way of coping with something else, the effect is not to help them heal; it is to deny them the care that would actually reduce their distress.
Trans people of all ages, whose identity is recast as a symptom of damage, and young trans people in particular, who may be denied affirming care on the basis that they are simply traumatised.