Gender dysphoria is a rare experience in society as a whole, affecting about 0.4 per cent of the population, which can make it hard to explain to the vast majority of people, who have not experienced it. To get around this, we often rely on metaphors. The clumsy phrase ‘born in the wrong body’ has become the favoured soundbite in popular media. Clumsy because – and this must be stressed – many trans people do not think this describes dysphoria at all well. To my mind, the trans writer expresses it more accurately: ‘Dysphoria,’ she says, ‘can feel like heartbreak.’ Heartbreak, its incapacitating grief and the sense of absence and loss which activate the same parts of the brain as physical pain, can be so all-consuming it interferes with your everyday life. So, too, dysphoria. For me, at least, this is a much richer way of describing how many trans people experience distress with their bodies – indeed, how I felt until I medically transitioned.

This craze to expedite gender transition in children goes against all clinical advice for "watchful waiting". The young brain evolves, children change their minds, puberty is troubling for many reasons. Yet the Scottish guidance allows no one to dispute a child's view, maybe acquired on Reddit and Tumblr, that he or she is in "the wrong body". Or to suggest that a child may simply be gay. The apparatus of medical transition, a hormone regime causing sterility, plus surgical removal of healthy tissue, is seen as wholly positive. PE teachers must tolerate girls using binders to strap down their hated breasts "which can lead to shortness of breath and can be painful during physical exertion" because they have "a positive impact on a young person's mental health".
We are being ordered to endorse a practice reminiscent of Chinese foot-binding or the Victorian tight-lacing craze where girls fainted to achieve the tiniest waist. Should we also hand out fresh razor blades so self-harm wounds don’t go septic? Or "affirm" anorexics' delusions that they are fat?

First, one of the most important – and, for many, confusing – questions: why do some trans people need medical intervention at all? Dysphoria, the antonym of ‘euphoria’, is the clinical term now used to describe the intense feeling of anxiety, distress or unhappiness some trans people feel in relation to their primary sex characteristics (genitals), their secondary sex characteristics (breasts, facial hair, menstruation, face shape, voice) or how these physical traits cause society to interact with them, by perceiving them as a male or female. Previously called ‘gender identity disorder’ and, before that, ‘transsexualism’, gender dysphoria is the name given to an experience many trans people struggle with, which can be helped by medical intervention. Although the term is widely used within the community, different trans people can experience dysphoria in very different ways, and so might have different clinical needs.

When I grew bored, I would lock myself in the bathroom and by on my mother's dresses that were in the hamper. I'd stand there as long as I could, looking at myself in the mirror, wishing I was someone else, wishing I was her.
Who was "her"? She was the person I imagined myself to be, in another dimension, in a past life, in some dream. I had never heard of gender dysphoria; the idea that your psychological and emotional gender identities do not match your assigned sex at birth. I didn't have a name for the way I felt. No information was available, and there was no adult that I could trust with my secret. I thought I was schizophrenic, or that my body was possessed by warring twin souls: one male, one female, both wanting control.
I would look down at my body in a dress and blur my vision until it almost felt real. My eyes scanned upward, hoping to see her face, but I would only find an insecure teenage boy dressed in women's clothes. I'd do this until it was time to take the dress off and go through the motions of flushing the toilet and pretending to wash my hands before stepping back into reality.

Gender-non-conforming behaviour is something to be celebrated, rather than the basis for teaching children that they may have been born in the wrong body, as some schools now do. There are many reasons why children and young people may experience gender dysphoria: it may be a sign that a child will go on to have a fixed trans identity in adulthood, but can also be associated with discomfort about puberty, grappling with same-sex attraction and childhood trauma. There is a coincidence with autism.
Yet the NHS has ignored this in embracing gender ideology's unevidenced affirmative model and has put growing numbers of young people on the path of irreversible medical treatment that can make them infertile and has potentially significant risks for their brain and physical development, without adequately exploring the reasons for their gender dysphoria.

I’m understanding that there are cases of transgender, but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad, and I’m afraid there’s a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that,” he said. “I find it wrong when you’ve got a six-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play, and you’re confusing him telling him, ‘Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.’

The last week has been a lesson in the difference between theory and practice. For several years now some feminists have tried to point out the risks posed by unquestioningly accepting claims about gender identity. When we pointed out that self-identification is unverifiable, and open to exploitation by sexual predators, we were shouted down and accused of transphobia. When we argued that vulnerable women prisoners should not have to share intimate spaces with men convicted of sex offences, we were told to think of the feelings of trans prisoners.

My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to “treat” this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.

And being so confused, because I don't feel like I want to go to the men's changing room, and I don't feel like I'm safe in the girl's changing room.

Both the boy and girl turn away from the mother as a sort of automatic reflex of their own needs for growth and independence. But the “horror, terror, contempt” they feel is, as we said, part of their own fantastic perceptions of a situation they can’t stand. This situation is not only the biological dependency and physicalness represented by the mother, but also the terrible revelation of the problem of the child’s own body. The mother’s body not only reveals a sex that threatens vulnerability and dependency—it reveals much more: it presents the problem of two sexes and so confronts the child with the fact that his body is itself arbitrary. It is not so much that the child sees that neither sex is “complete” in itself or that he understands that the particularity of each sex is a limitation of potential, a cheating of living fulness in some ways—he can’t know these things or fully feel them. It is again not a sexual problem; it is more global, experienced as the curse of arbitrariness that the body represents. The child comes upon a world in which he could just as well have been born male or female, even dog, cat, or fish—for all that it seems to matter as regards power and control, capacity to withstand pain, annihilation, and death. The horror of sexual differentiation is a horror of “biological fact,” as Brown so well says. It is a fall out of illusion into sobering reality. It is a horror of assuming an immense new burden, the burden of the meaning of life and the body, of the fatality of one’s incompleteness, his helplessness, his finitude. And this, finally, is the hopeless terror of the castration complex that makes men tremble in their nightmares. It expresses the realization by the child that he is saddled with an impossible project; that the causa-sui pursuit on which he is launched cannot be achieved by body-sexual means, even by protesting a body different from the mother. The fortress of the body, the primary base for narcissistic operations against the world in order to insure one’s boundless powers, crumbles like sand. This is the tragic dethroning of the child, the ejection from paradise that the castration complex represents. Once he used any bodily zone or appendage for his Oedipal project of self-generation; now, the very genitals themselves mock his self-sufficiency.

The first of these is what we may call a polarization of sexual differences (V.6), i.e., the elaboration of a particular ratio of masculinity and femininity in line with identity development. Some of our patients suffer more lastingly and malignantly from a state not uncommon in a milder and transient form in all adolescence: the young person does not feel himself clearly to be a member of one sex or the other, which may make him the easy victim of the pressure emanating, for example, from homosexual cliques, for to some persons it is more bearable to be typed as something, anything, than to endure drawn-out bisexual confusion

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'

The psychotherapist must not allow his vision to be coloured by the glasses of pathology; he must never allow himself to forget that the ailing mind is a human mind, and that, for all its ailments, it shares in the whole of the psychic life of man. The psychotherapist must even be able to admit that the ego is ill for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole, and has lost its connection with mankind as well as with the spirit.

“Transgender” is a fashionable mental disorder being presented to kids as a legitimate medical condition. Shameful.