One of the problems with Mumsnet being such a popular site is that threads pop up every day that go over things that were discussed just days before in other long threads that presumably nobody on the new thread has read.
Over the past few weeks I have tried to reply to as many posts as I can but it is hard to keep up.
On topics such as the Swedish study above - which gets posted a lot on here I have noticed. But hardly ever that one of the authors subsequently discredited it and a later study contradicted it.
Part of the problem with these studies is that most transsexuals, post transition, are never followed up. I was not after about 1982. Nor were any of those I know who I met in the NHS programme in the 70s.
We have successfully transitioned and got our lives together and our dysphoria has gone. We did not seek help and often have moved so cannot be traced.
Surveys like these will always be based on small numbers, because very few people in the UK are transsexual, about 100 - 200 cases a year, that's it in the whole UK.
You would not think that would you? But that's why for the 60 years or so these cases have been handled by the NHS you have not really heard anything, because the treatment was carried out to let you get on with life and once done that was it. No campaign to alter definitions or demand access to anywhere.
So you have to ask yourself what has suddenly changed in the last 3 or 4 years? It is not the transsexuals who have changed it, because the carefully honed treatment protocols and ways to help formed over decades have always been, and are right now, available to them.
But to do that they have to accept reality, know the limitations of what can and cannot be done, be properly medically assessed and psychologically studied and other options explored with surgery and transition very much the last chance saloon.
Studies like the Swedish one emphasise the problems and under stress those with none because the former seek out help or are in trouble and visible and the latter simply disappear from view.
As for the T level discussion - there is only one successful way to get T levels down to normal female range. That is the surgery that transsexuals undergo.
Many transsexuals - most of whom do have surgery - have levels well within the normal range. Mine has not been above 2.5 at any point when tested.
The levels of surgery are dropping sharply for one main reason. Only transsexuals with dysphoria seek and need this to survive.
The many other people who in the past were not transitioned by the NHS because they did not have this medical condition, which is what it is, largely do not want to have it.
In many ways they actively want to stay physically male and just 'live as' women.
This is why there is such a huge push for Self ID. To gain legal acceptance without doing anything in return required now except sign a declaration.
In my experience there has to be more than that. Society needs a proper medical and psychological assessment and the need for legal gender change to be more specific than just a lifestyle choice.
When you have dysphoria it is far more than that. Transssexuals will hardly ever detransition because those who are this are almost always given a relatively normal life (success rates are some of the best levels in any surgical procedure I believe).
I know it is hard to grasp from the outside looking in and from your perspective appears as someone stealing rights. But the GRA was mostly brought in because of the human rights act legislation not because transsexuals went on the rampage demanding access.
If there had been you would have had this debate 20 - 30 years ago, not today.
What is changing now is that many people not covered by that act and who are excluded from legal transition by that act want in - which they can only do by sweeping aside all the built in safeguards that were rightly put there to protect both women and the transitioner from doing so unwisely, inappropriately and as a consequence of issues that can be treated differently.
This is not about those few thousand then or now well aware they have a medical problem and willing to be tested, experimented on, assessed and ultimately aided to find the best way to resolve their condition. Because we understand what is and is not true about reality. We have never sought to redefine any words.
This is about the hundreds of thousands of others who want to redefine being a woman as a matter of personal choice without any identified medical cause.
I think that would be wrong - for women, for the sake of transsexuals who seem perfectly fine with the process as it stands and, just as importantly, for the sake of these other gender fluid people themselves - some of whom will possibly transition and then regret it if it is made so easy that it becomes a social experiment and not a survival necessity.