Only by outliers. This is more of the “factual fiction” that is being bantied about in some quarters. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American Psychological Association, and all of those involved in WPATH disagree with your statement. Gender affirming care has been available for decades. The effective methods of treatment for dysphoria are well known and well accepted. Not to provide necessary care results in extreme mental health challenges for those with dysphoria. Over 75% of those with this condition have suicidal ideation and over 40% attempt suicide at some point in their life. Too many are successful. Appropriate care greatly resolve these issues.
Having said this, it is true that there is a certain amount of trendiness in being trans among a small portion of the population. Some experiment with non-conforming identities. The key is that over time they quickly give up on their delusion if they are not really trans. Trans people cannot be converted or cured and cis people cannot be converted into being trans. That is one of the reasons that the first line of therapy is mental health counseling. No one provides treatment precipitously, especially surgical modification.
As for HRT, it is generally delayed until well after an individual reaches the age of puberty. The front line modality is puberty blockers, the effects of which quickly disappear if an individual turns out to be cis. Then puberty can be allowed to continue normally. It is a way of buying time until the individual and those who are treating them can determine with certainty whether an individual suffers from gender dysphoria or not.
Even in those states which allow self identification by adults, there are still major hoops to go through before any surgical intervention is undertaken. The affected individual has to be under the care of a physician providing HRT for at least one year, live openly as the sex with which they identify for at least one year, and be under the treatment of two mental health professionals for at least one year, one of whom must be either an MD psychiatrist or a PhD psychologist. The other can be an LCSW. No surgeon will perform gender affirming surgery without letters from each of these professionals certifying that GAS is appropriate for their patients. These are significant hurdles to overcome.
Beyond this, many states (like Florida where I live) require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a mental health professional before HRT can even be undertaken and a letter stating this has to be provided to their endocrinologist, which is an additional hurdle. No one is moving precipitously. Everyone wants to make sure they get it right.
