Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Like another person said, trans people often follow gender ideology which is just that, an ideology, that some may disagree with. Is it transphobic? I don't think so, though I see how it could be debatable, but disagreeing with an ideology doesn't automatically make you hateful or phobic of it.

I feel like it’s transphobic if you just assume all trans people subscribe to an ideology and are therefore would bad parents. If you would be okay with a transsexual who doesn’t believe those things then it wouldn’t be transphobia. I do feel like sometime people will try to say nothing is transphobia because trans people are always bad. I guess if someone believes that or than all trans people would be unfit to be parents, I’d have a hard time not seeing that as transphobia.

In my view, the trans identity is more than a physical medical state, it's a lifestyle and an ideology, and (again in my view) a mental ailment consisting of gender dysphoria and other comorbidities (you reject this anecdotally but the studies show high comorbidities of mental illness so I think many would consider it a valid concern).

Yeah, I see it as more like a physical medical state at least for someone like me. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness or something very close one, but it is something that can be treated or the distress caused by it can go away. People can have like ideological views about gender or embrace different lifestyles, but those things don’t have to be part of it. I did want to say that don’t reject the idea that trans people are more likely to have comorbid mental illnesses. They are and there isn’t any way around that based o the research. The only reason I don’t think it relevant to the adoption conversation is that someone with BPD, NPD, or BIID (just to name a few) would never be approved to adopt. We’ve been impressed with how detailed and invasive getting approved to adopt is. States take this so seriously and I’m so confident that someone with a serious mental illness would not be allowed to do it.

The way I interpreted your question and framed my response is from someone who is willingly giving up their kid because they have to, and who wants the best and most stable life for their kid possible. This is obviously not the case for any or even most adoptions, and in many cases the birth parents may not know about the adoptive family at all and vice versa. But, if there is open communication between the parties, I think this is a relevant detail.

We are wanting to pursue a totally open adoption. The more we learned about it the more we felt like would be the best for the child. I think this is becoming more common too compared to how it was years ago. Totally closed adoptions are really uncommon now if you are adopting domestically (speaking from a U.S. perspective).