I’ve noticed a trend since before I myself became a teenager. A lot of kids as they head into adolescence start putting on a show about how much they resemble the cultural descriptions of the sex they are perceived to be. I mean, you see them clearly doing things like modifying their selection of apparel to include things that the other sex hardly ever wears, and adjusting their speech patterns, posture, attitudes, and activity preferences. It’s almost as if they were concerned that someone might misidentify them as a different sex than they’ve generally been cast as unless they exaggerate as many signaling traits as possible, and that’s a form of acting.
And seriously, any discussion of whether teenagers (or anyone else) are doing other than expressing their identities when claiming to be trans should be juxtaposed against this backdrop of people acting out cis in the above-described exaggerated fashion.