system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why don't transgender people simply get counseling on their feelings and learn to accept their bodies as they are, rather than getting life altering surgery to fix their mental state?
gpt
The explanation I've been given is that being transgender is like having a mismatch between your OS and your hardware. Your brain  continues to create error messages like "ESTROGEN LEVELS LOW!" or "Pinging Vagina - ERROR VAGINA NOT FOUND." Counseling can help some people deal with the dysphoria, but in many cases we've found it is better to actually treat the physical problem with hormones and surgery.

To keep the analogy going, changing the hardware is easier than trying to patch or rewrite the OS.

There are scientific studies that strongly suggest that transgendered people legitimately have different brain chemistry than cisgendered people, and that their concerns are medically legitimate. To not treat them would be dickish.