But you're still operating on the premise that what persons who claim to "feel like" the opposite sex - or no sex - experience in childhood is highly unusual. When I don't think their experiences are that unusual - at all.

It's common for kids to go through all sorts of distressing, disorienting & discombobulating experiences growing up - and many kids experience major traumas. Moreover, kids have amazingly rich fantasy lives. I remember teaching USA kids circa age 9-11 a summer writing course more than 40 years ago, and all the kids in the class were writing about their "memories" of their "OBE"s - out of body experiences, not Order of the British Empire, LOL - coz belief in OBEs was popular amongst kids at the time. (Not coincidentally, methinks, the next decade brought a rash of accusations of satanic ritual abuse & CSA in daycare centers as well as the new phenomenon of recovered memory syndrome amongst mostly young adults.)

Until the era of mass vaccinations came to pass very recently in history, it's been the norm for nearly all children to go through bouts of serious childhood illness involving high fevers, fever dreams & hallucinations whilst awake. I recall several instances of hallucinating like that as a child when sick with measles, chicken pox & other once-common childhood illnesses. And before that, at age 3 I had a vision of the Virgin Mary coming into my bedroom one night, and was sure at age 4 that the spirit of my older brother who had recently died came to get me another night & took me flying high in the heavens so I could see the stars up close & the earth far away down below. My parents didn't shame me when I reported these experiences, but they didn't "affirm" that they'd actually happened, either. And they certainly didn't tell me that my claimed visions meant I was a really special little girl with mystical abilities who was destined to be a saint. Nor did they trot me down to the parish church to tell the priest & bishop so I could get put on the fast track to canonization.

IMO, what's unusual with those who say that since childhood they've always "felt like" the opposite sex (or now increasingly, neither sex) is the way they interpret what they've experienced, not necessarily what they actually experienced in & of itself. And I think a MAIN problem is that there IS or has been an "adult in the room" - or many adults in a number of different rooms - helping them make sense of their experience. Only instead of providing kids, adolescents & young adults with the "reality check" and the tools they need to correctly assess & healthily process & deal with their experiences, these screwed-up, regressively sexist, homophobic adults - be they, parents, gender therapists, "LGBTQ+" "educators," promulgators of QT, charities, political lobby groups, YouTubers, gamers, groomers and so on - have filled these kids' & young people's heads with a lot of harmful nonsense.