Questions of authenticity, insecurity, and the urge to Finally Become One’s Truest, Happiest, Best Self (often as quickly as possible), are common to all humans — as you note, Kierkegaard wrote about that.
When people date, get married, or try to get pregnant or adopt a child, they are pursuing a goal for what they believe is their best life. They are also seeking fulfillment when they go to college, buy a house, or move far away. They are trying to protect or uphold something when they engage in “purity culture” (avoiding sex before marriage). They are looking for something when they have secret affairs outside their marriage. Divorce, too, is often tied to the existential search for a better, more authentic life. When someone spends their life planning exotic vacations and hoping to lose five pounds off their belly, or when they buy a new pair of fancy shoes or dream of learning guitar, they’re trying to reimagine themselves. When they read arguments for and against the existence of God and worry about whether they’re following the right religion, they are trying to figure big stuff out. When they dream of making more money (and more money after that, and more after that), that involves a lot of speculative aspirations that may not ever be attainable. When they go to psychotherapy or listen to inspirational speakers, the implication is that they are broken and that the answer is to be found somewhere else.
Everyone is existentially insecure all the time. This is not unique to transgender people. Transgender people are self-actualizing just as everyone else wants to self-actualize, though their flavor is different.
I suggest that, rather than speculating about transgender people’s psychology and whether they might be “negating” some important part of themselves rather than actually “solving” their troubles, you read some memoirs written by transgender people. More than one, ideally, since transgender people are not a monolith any more than “men” or “women” are a monolith. Transgender people do explain their thoughts, feelings, and experiences about their own lives, so, if you really want to analyze their way of thinking about their own lives, you could begin with what they themselves have written. It doesn’t have to be a mystery.
As for people who transition as teenagers:
These days, “puberty blockers” are available. These simply delay the body’s natural puberty, and the effects *are* generally reversible, which is a helpful option for children. The effect of adult sex hormones is less reversible. It depends exactly what you mean by “reversible.” Someone who takes estrogen, grows breasts, then does not want breasts, would need that surgically reversed. Someone who takes testosterone, grows hair, then does not want hair, would need electrolysis. Change might be increasingly difficult, expensive, and painful, as tattoo removal can be more of an ordeal than the original tattoo, but you can certainly try it.
If you mean that we cannot reverse any decision because the past is already past: Yes. That applies to anyone who gets married or divorced or buys a candy bar and then wishes they’d bought a different candy bar. The past is irreversible. We can only go forward. We can get married again. We can eat another candy bar.
I would like people not to project their own anxiety about the irreversibility of past decisions onto transgender people (kids or adults), very few of whom “de-transition.” Transgender people generally have to work very hard to convince gatekeepers to allow them to transition, and they are the ones taking upon themselves the responsibility to unbuild and rebuild their lives, with whatever risks that comes with. Their lives are theirs. No one else needs to manage that anxiety for them. Also, insofar as they “de-transition,” arguably they were not transgender to begin with, or they stopped being transgender, or they redefined the kind of transgender that they are. So this is not so much a problem of being transgender as it is a problem of not knowing whether one is transgender or not knowing what one wants. Declaring that one’s own gender transition was a mistake is a problem that would afflict cisgender (non-transgender) people more than it affects actual transgender people, which is probably why cisgender people are the ones worrying about it. This is a fear from a cisgender perspective.
For a close analogy: How often does someone go to the trouble of coming out as gay, finding a same-gender partner, marrying them, maybe adopting kids, then saying, “Actually, I’m really straight, and I can’t stay in this gay marriage”? Not only is it rare, but, when it does happen, it would be this particular person’s path to travel in life, and clearly they are responsible for the fallout of their own irreversible decisions. Their conundrum or their unique identity labyrinth doesn’t reflect on gay people in general. It might say more about straight people.
If your question hinges on whether children perceive, feel, know, or express their gender identities differently than adults do; whether children tend to be more expansive, open-minded, flexible, changeable, fickle, or confused in this regard than adults are; and whether young people might be more severely affected by regret than adults might be so troubled; those are indeed askable questions. But when any discussion of “transgender people” is met with “Including people under 18? Some of whom have changed their minds?,” it seems like an irrelevant deflection.
There is any amount of moralizing literature about “People want X, and they pursue X but they are never happy, because X is not the meaning of life and will never fulfill you, so don’t run away from your real life or your real struggles just to chase X.” In a sense it is true: *nothing* is the meaning of life, *nothing* ever fulfills us. But, then, why focus criticism on any specific X? (Sex, money, power, beauty, youth, food, drugs, wrong god, any god, atheism, independence.) Why warn people against ever pursuing X at all? These discourses that are specifically against “X” are often grounded in a specific fear of the named X that hasn’t been unpacked. Saying that it will not solve your Ultimate Underlying Problem and will not take you to the Summit of Ultimate Fulfillment isn’t enough of an explanation because it is a truism for every nameable X.
Kierkegaard was attracted to a particular woman when he was 24, finally proposed to her at 27, broke it off a year later citing his own emotional problems and insisting he couldn’t possibly marry anyone ever, and spent the rest of his life (he lived another 14 years) obsessing over what that relationship had been all about—devoting his attention to writing, as you noted, about whether people should make a leap of faith, religiously or otherwise, and whether we have got a good grasp on who we really are. He probably should have married that woman, since he spent his life reflecting on the fact that he hadn’t. Maybe the marriage would have been a disaster, but that was a risk he could have taken. Most people do take the risk of marriage at some point. It’s not obvious that non-action was the safer or better path for him.
