This is what the Portman Clinic had to say about Gender Transition in 2002

[BarrackerBarmer]

...pre Gender Recognition Act, following the court case which precipitated the GRA.

8 Portman Clinicians wrote this letter to the Telegraph:

"Sir - The recent judgment in the European Court of Human Rights (report, July 12), in which a post-operative transsexual person was granted permission to marry in his adopted gender role, is a victory of fantasy over reality.

The experience of many psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists working with transsexual patients is that they are individuals who, for complex reasons, need to escape from an intolerable psychological reality into a more comfortable fantasy. By attempting to live as a member of the opposite sex, they try to avoid internal conflict, which may otherwise prove to be too distressing.

It is a measure of the urgency and desperation of their situation that they frequently seek surgery to make their fantasy real. By carrying out a "sex change" operation on their bodies, they hope to eliminate the conflict in their minds. Unfortunately, what many patients find is that they are left with a mutilated body, but the internal conflicts remain.

Through years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, some patients begin to understand the origins of their painful conflicting feelings and can find new ways of dealing with them, other than by trying to alter their bodies. The recent legal victory risks reinforcing a false belief that it is possible to actually change a person's gender. It might also strengthen the view that the only solution to psychic pain is a legal or surgical one."

(Bolding mine)

BarrackerBarmer

Really interesting article and yes their concerns seem to have been dismissed in a sea of short-termism and identity politics.

There are psychiatrists and psychiatrists - the ones that just do therapy - ie psychoanalytic psychotherapy, are the good guys mainly, doing deep work and also have done their own inner work.

Of the rest, most haven't done their own inner work so think they're well and the patient ill. Run a mile the other way.

What a sane and evidence based description. This shows compassion for the individuals affected but also acknowledges reality and safeguarding.

This should be the baseline that policy should be following

Very interesting - thank op.
I read this yesterday - it's about the subversion of language, the rubbishing of science and truth and the undermining of democracy (it seems appropriate to post this on a forum where emotion has so displaced reason that we can no longer state biological facts).
... rightwing thinktanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science have employed a strategy first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. “Doubt is our product,” read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” The strategy, essentially, was this: dig up a handful of so-called professionals to refute established science or argue that more research is needed; turn these false arguments into talking points and repeat them over and over; and assail the reputations of the genuine scientists on the other side ... the “tobacco strategy” was helped ... by elements in the mainstream media that tended “to give minority views more credence than they deserve”. This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth-telling, wilful neutrality with accuracy; caving in to pressure from rightwing interest groups to present “both sides”; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints – even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community. For instance, a 2011 BBC Trust report found that the broadcaster’s science coverage paid “undue attention to marginal opinion” on the subject of manmade climate change. Or, as a headline in the Telegraph put it, “BBC staff told to stop inviting cranks on to science programmes”. In a speech on press freedom, CNN’s chief international correspondent ... addressed this issue ... saying: “It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth … I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences. I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalising the truth.”
www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/14/the-death-of-truth-how-we-gave-up-on-facts-and-ended-up-with-trump

Excellent post and all too relevant quote, Groundcontrol. Oddly enough, I've just compared trans ideology to Young Earth Creationism on another thread. The difference is that YEC don't insist the rest of us adopt their faith, nor do they seek to enforce it by changing the law.