I believe it's implied. Typically the bureaucratic hoops involve 1-2 mental health professionals writing letters in support, potentially 0-2 years "living as the gender" before they will write those letters, meetings with your doctor, bloodwork for baseline hormone levels (sometimes multiple times), and then finally you might get a scrip.
But if you encounter someone along the way who doesn't want to co-operate, you might need to redo those steps. It's really rather difficult, depending on where you are.
I'm non-binary. Some days the body dysphoria hits hard. Some days it's not a big deal at all. I am mostly unhappy I can't just float between them day by day. The body dysphoria I feel is mostly a dissatisfaction with how permanent bodies are. (There's a reason so many trans folks are also transhumanists. Gimme that cyber body please.)
You are asking a good question (it reads to me like a good faith question that comes from a desire to learn more about how others think).
> Is it biological in basis, spiritual/metaphysical, or cultural?
Personally, I view it as cultural leading to physiological -- what does it mean to be a man? What is "manly"? I think everyone can agree that "manliness" is different globally. Is Bill Gates manly? He's very successful, but is that something that's manly? Is Tom Cruise manly? Or Kid Rock? What about George Takei? Manliness has some multi-axis definition that exists in each culture around the world.
We call that set of vectors "being a man", and we push people who are born with penises into it because it seems to fit most people who are born with XY chromosomes. Personally, I think it's useful to decouple the two ideas -- what my body is, and what the cultural expectations are in how I should behave because I have that body. This is what people mean when they say gender is a social construct -- they are saying, "The piece we call 'manliness' is a separate concept from the piece we define by bodies."
Now, say I experience anxiety, fear, and revulsion about the set of vectors that define "manliness". I have a penis, but absolutely all the vectors for "womanliness" line up with my understanding of how the world works. Clothing, presentation, speech patterns, interests, activities, etc. etc. etc. What do I do in such a case?
I could just live my life in pursuit of the 'wrong' set of vectors -- but socially that's quite dangerous. When people who are "supposed" to maximize one set of vectors try to live with another set, they tend to get bullied (if not violently attacked.) This puts me in a bind -- either live a miserable life pretending to be manly OR push my body to try and match the set of vectors associated with womanliness. (Or, change society to stop caring so much about people who fall outside of the traditional vector space, but that's a lot harder than either of the two other approaches.)
> is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles?
For me, absolutely! That's the exactly the sort of ideal world I'd love to be in -- let people just... pursue what makes them feel happy. If someone with a penis wants to get way into makeup and the color pink, stop beating the shit out of them for it.
My understanding was like... you know those spring diagrams, where edges of a graph are all attached by a spring, and physics sorta causes nodes to cluster naturally? I think this is saying, "I wish all the space around me could order itself into a more natural and pleasing shape."
> Same here
Dyads are like... imagine you had two vectors, represented by lego bricks. After attaching them, rather than having a red brick and a blue brick, you have a particular Red-Blue brick. So, one can imagine these unique shapes move and vibrate in ways that are unique to that pair.
The author is saying, I think, "Individual preferences aren't composed of atomic units, but rather subtle adjustments in all the combinations of those individual pieces. Evolution probably looks for places where those combinations line up nicely (and avoids places they don't line up nicely), and tunes the organism to seek those combinations."
> before there was a culture around taking things in another direction
You are talking about a time before culture? Trans identity shows up as early as Mesopotamia, and there are cultures around the globe that have different genders than just Man and Woman.
This person is uneducated and angry, and is choosing to be deliberately obtuse in hopes of irritating people they disagree with. Probably not worth the time to even respond to them.