It’s not always the parents driving this. For older kids it can be friends influencing them - this is what happened with our kid. No warning signs of dysphoria at all, just an ASD Aspie girl who liked sylvanian families and sharks and art and dragons. A kid that was bullied and ostracized relentlessly in primary school. Then secondary school puberty started and the one friend they made started showing them crap on tumblr and, as they were confused and uncomfortable with their changes and behold they decided she was a he. It became their special interest and they became wedded to it and have been ever since. There’s a whole industry in the Uk just waiting for kids to butt heads with their parents on stuff like this. Whole swathes of activist social worker assholes who will be only too glad to insinuate themselves into your family with the weight of “the child’s best interest” behind them and insidiously work to fracture your family. So we have had to walk a tightrope for 7 years to challenge and encourage critical thinking whilst not being too combative or hard line because that would just drive them away to the waiting assholes who would have them on hormones and surgical pathways before they could blink and we’d lose any sort of influence. We count it as a win that they’ve got to 20 years old without any medication or surgical butchery and have said they don’t want to go that route. They still spout rubbish about “memories” that bear no resemblance to shared experiences, and refer to themself as he but I Pray each day that they are beginning to wake from this hypnosis and we will get our intelligent beautiful quirky daughter back rather than this confused stranger who has been inhabiting her skin for 7 years.