I apologize for making the assumption that you don't have experience working with children or qualifications to do so. That was prejudiced of me. I sincerely am sorry.

I carefully read both "studies" you cited, and have concluded that neither can be taken at all seriously as proof - or even as flimsy evidence - of their own claims, which BTW are actually more modest than the sweeping claims you say these studies make and prove.

The first one certainly cannot be said to "confirm" "the effectiveness of surgery on mental health outcomes." It's also not a "study." Rather, it's an "invited commentary" - in other word an opinion piece commissioned by an editor of JAMA Surgery, a publication whose raison d'etre is promoting surgeries and the interests of surgeons - that isn't based on investigating the outcomes of actual "trans surgery" patients who've been seen & followed up on face to face. Rather, it draws unsubstantiated conclusions from "an analysis" of the responses of anonymous persons to an online questionnaire meant to survey the US trans population circa 2013-14 that was published by the Williams Institute in 2015. Nobody even knows if the people who answered that online questionnaire actually are "trans" - and there's no way to tell how many, if any, were truthful in their answers.

Moreover, the people who did this "analysis" and wrote the opinion piece/commentary are two plastic surgeons who do "gender affirming" surgeries and a specialist in "gender medicine" who funnels patients to the surgeons. In other words, the authors are three people heavily invested in promoting surgeries as "the answer" for people with "gender issues" because that's how they all make their living - and their entire reputations and financial wellbeing are based on other medical professionals, the general public and potential patients seeing the sorts of surgeries they do and promote in a positive light.

And here’s a study showing that transitioning with supports leads to children with less elevated anxiety and other mental health issues than typical or gender identity disorder cases (meaning not significantly different than baseline youth population)

I don't have time to go into this other study in full detail here, but if you actually read it carefully & look at the methods used, you'll see that it has HUGE flaws.

Moreover, it doesn't say what you allege. It says right from the outset that the 73 kids age 3-12 in the study who were "socially transitioned" with full support of their parents and other adults in their lives had more anxiety than the baseline youth population and their closest age siblings.

Significantly, the levels of depression and anxiety in the 73 "trans" children studied also weren't determined by mental health professionals interviewing, observing and assessing the kids directly. Rather, the "trans" kids' levels of depression and anxiety were determined by having the parents of these children fill out standardized PROMIS forms which solely recorded the parents' perceptions of their children's mental health status by providing responses to such statements as "my child cries a lot" and "my child likes to be alone." And the study authors chose to use the very brief "short PROMIS forms" too, not the longer PROMIS forms that they had available to them, they could just as easily have used and which might have provided a fuller picture.

Since the parents of these very young children who filled out these brief forms are also the same people who "transed" these same kids, it seems reasonable to suspect they might have been inclined and incentivized to see and to report that the children they'd already deemed "trans" and were dressing and rearing according to the regressive sex stereotypes associated with the opposite sex were doing much better in terms of mental health than they actually were doing. After all, none of us parents like to have our parenting decisions, methods and styles called into doubt; and none of us likes to think that we have made parenting choices that have ended up harming our kids.

Yet even these clearly not impartial parents still reported that the the kids they had transed had higher levels of anxiety than the controls - including when the controls were the transed kids' own siblings who were closest in age.

Also, I don't think the fact that the transed kids in the study were perceived by their parents not to have become more depressed after being transed than they previously had been, and that they weren't seen as any more depressed than the controls either, is really the ringing endorsement of childhood "transition" that you seem to think it is.

The key issue is, all the kids in the study - both the transed kids who were the focus, and the kids who served as controls/comparators - are from a generation of children with vastly higher rates of depression (and other mental health problems) than any other generations previously in history. Why are so many kids nowadays depressed? And if early-in-life social "transition" really does lead to "improved overall happiness" in children and teens as you keep saying it does, why doesn't this study that you yourself have cited as an example actually show that? If early "transition" is so great, why aren't droves of transed kids actually happy?

Seems to me one of the reasons both these "trans kids" and other kids are suffering anxiety, depression and other MH problems at rates never seen before is their parents. In the case of parents with so-called "trans kids," why are so many adults nowadays so heavily invested in sex stereotypes and gender ideology that they'd go so far as to "transition" their pre-pubescent chidren? And why are such people being taken good judges of the mental health status of their kids - or of anything else? After all, these parents are the very same people who taught their children not only to believe in rigid sex stereotypes, but that they as little kids must conform to those stereotypes - or esle.

Why can't these parents just love and accept their kids as they are? Why can't they let their sons wear tutus and play with dolls and their daughters have short hair and play with toy trains, cars & trucks? Why tell these poor children that if their personalities & interests deviate even slightly from the strictest of sexist standards that it means they must have the brains of the opposite sex and were "born in the wrong body"?