I'm fine with you personally, and I'm grateful you're here. It's the ideas at play. Yeah, they can be a bit distressing, but it's my choice to participate, and it's my goal to not be abusive to anyone here over them... call me out on that if need be, and anyone is welcome do to that, publicly. Let me just clarify my point after reading your piece, we don't have to resolve it, and we can part amicably. This is why discussion is good, we can actually get to the point of contention.

I don't think people are born with fetishes.

I think some people are born with an essential predisposition to them, and they will develop one, hell or high water. There is something biologically essential about these people. There appear to be several different clusters, so we're likely looking at several different aetiologies.

Latex fetishism? I guarantee you there's no gene for latex fetishism, specifically. Latex is a relatively recent technological invention. Evolution does not work that quickly, and latex fetishism detracts from reproductive fitness. Selective pressure. Nobody's born with this mental image of latex buried deep in their brains, and once they find it in their external environment, that there's some "aha, yes, THAT!" moment. It is learned, no doubt about it. But I can turn on MTV today, or some other mass media outlet and see people wearing latex clothes. I'm not a latex fetishist. We're all exposed to the same stimuli, only some people latch onto it. Once that interest is established, it's locked in.

A world without latex? A world without latex fetishists.

A fetish isn't volitional. You can browse the internet at length reading post after post after post of people asking how they can get rid of their fetish. A fetish can be established without any moral turbidity. (It can later result in moral turbidity, just as some people rape, as well.) A fetish may be learned, but that does not mean it can be unlearned. If it's compelling, it won't soon be forgotten. Sexuality is compelling.

If they hadn't found latex, they'd have found something else within their paraphillic cluster.

To make it less muddy, let's just focus on FTM girls who think they are gay boys.

I wish we could do that. This is one of the challenges talking about trans, me, you, us, society at large. There's different kinds of trans people.

In this reply so far, I've been talking about fetishism, paraphilia, that's an appropriate approach because of autogynephilia. Autoandrophilia/autohomoeroticism does appear to be a phenomena as well, certainly there's HSTS, but I don't think these are the primary things motivating most FTM today, the adolescent-onset/ROGD cohort. Switching gears to talk about adolescent-onset in women.

I don't think porn is the cause. It's there, yes, but it's an outlet for the sexuality they already have--they desire men. Porn overall is the result of the diversity of human sexuality that already exists. It's the chicken/egg issue, which came first?

There have been several posts on /r/gendercritical by women who admitted that yaoi caused them to have this fetish

It's about life narratives. People want an explanation for why they are they way that they are, and the things they've done. Sometimes that's a rationalization, sometimes it's a justification.

I'd like to persuade you to consider that at least sometimes in some cases porn is the root cause, but if you disagree, then that's that.

I'll give more thought to it, perhaps I can't be persuaded today that's it's the root cause, but I'll give more credence to it being a contributing factor. If I take 100 women, and set them up with /r/yaoi, I don't think they're all going to then want to transition. Certainly, and this is to your point, the perception of a welcoming society, largely the Internet, and a discernible, favorable trajectory does not dissuade someone from transitioning. I'm all for dissuading and disabusing people that transitioning is "the solution" or that it will lead to a happier, healthier life. It overwhelmingly does not. Obviously, we're in agreement on that.

Most MTF today is paraphilic, it's caused by sexuality. Most FTM presently isn't, but it has overwhelming sexual implications.