Most of the private gender freelancers have NHS day jobs and are thus somewhat motivated to at least loosely follow NHS policies - some people will end up being seen by exact same NHS clinicians as they saw privately while on the NHS waitlists and if one process was wildly different to another it would likely just make the clinicians own lives harder in the long run (trans patients are prone to making complaints, search What Do They Know for FOIs sent to GICs for evidence of some rather alarming grudge-holding).
Some of the private psychs respond to triage forms with (paraphrasing) ‘Dr Gender is not able to help you in a timely manner’ which kinda makes it sound like they have an overflowing wait list (plausible deniability!) but really seems to mean something like ‘Your history of complex mental health conditions means I can’t funnel you down the one Zoom appointment, £350, letter of recommendation for hormones supplied within 6 weeks route without serious risk to my licence to practice. See you in 2-4 years when you can have multiple NHS appointments and I can spread the legal liability amongst a whole NHS team, maybe even two teams if we occasionally send an email to your local mental health trust’
The thing that makes Gender Care/Gender Doctors/Northern Gender Network a less-bad option than GenderGP is that the prescribing endocrinologist is GMC registered and will either enter a ‘shared care’ agreement with the patient’s GP for prescriptions and blood tests or, if the GP refuses (which is their legal right) the endocrinologist will be obligated to monitor/prescribe at their own professional risk, or cease to issue prescriptions (which they will eventually do if the patient doesn’t provide blood tests/pay for follow-up consultations).
Whereas GenderGP have mysterious, unnamed doctors who aren’t on the GMC register (and thus there is nowhere to complain to if the patient is harmed).
I’m absolutely not encouraging/endorsing cross sex hormones for gender distress/dysphoria/identity affirmation btw, but I do appreciate that once a DC is a legal adult parental intervention cannot achieve much more than harm reduction, especially if the adult child is utterly determined to self harm in this manner.
FWIW It’s my understanding that estrogen is less immediately harmful to the male body than testosterone is to the female body, but males are more able to access genital surgery in a shorter time frame than females, so swings and roundabouts re: which sexed route causes most life-impacting harm in a 5-8 year time span.
if your DS does start the medical process, do try to keep gently questioning and encouraging him to develop critical thought rather than completely giving in or giving up hope. Gender transition amongst girls is becoming increasing unfashionable (social contagion of cross sex identity is now becoming a social contagion of desisting or detransing) and teen boys are a few years behind on the trend trajectory so it should start to fall out of favour in a year or two. Delay medicalisation as much as you can (be aware that while I said Popleyuk seems more cautious than some other psychs he also has much shorter waiting lists, as trans people have declared him a gatekeeper and gatekeeping is abusive, or somesuch. Might be better to aim for someone
like Dundas (Gendercare) who is quite middle of the road, NHS compliant in approach but also popular enough to have a 6 month plus waitlist.