I believe there is only one Dr James Barrett at Charing Cross GIC.
Article from ;The Friend'
‘It is soul-crushing and miserable for anyone to live pretending to be something they are not.’
11 Apr 2019
(extract)
James Barrett runs Britain’s largest and oldest gender identity clinic. In the first of a Friend series on gender identity issues, he gives his reflections on thirty years of work.
"In my working life I have spent over thirty years in a gender identity clinic, working with and trying to help people whose sense of themselves doesn’t fit the gender role they were assigned at birth. I’m a doctor – effectively a practitioner scientist – and in the course of what can sometimes be fairly high publicity work my being a Quaker doesn’t usually arise. It would be obvious only to those already sensitive to the occasional Quakerly turn of phrase or point of view. It’s a strangely reversed experience, therefore, to be in the company of Friends who mainly know me as a fellow Quaker and in this context talk about gender. It’s not something that I have previously done because it hasn’t generally arisen, but since it has, mine is a perspective unshared until now.(continues)
Gender’, in fact, firms up a bit on closer examination and a bit of linguistic dissection. There is, for example, ‘gender’ used to describe the way anyone has a sense of themselves. Most people feel male or feel female (a few people feel neither or a bit of both). For most people that sense of themselves fits their body and the label that came on their birth certificate. For a few people, it does not. How anyone feels can’t be argued with; it’s their reality.
Then there is a social gender role. This is the way we are perceived by society and as a consequence are expected to behave, to dress, to work (this to a pleasingly diminishing extent) and even, perhaps, to think. It predicts how others expect us to behave, too. Others might expect us to be collaborative, communicative and nurturing if we are perceived as female, competitive, overbearing and maybe even violent if we are perceived as male.
It is soul-crushing and miserable for anyone to live their lives pretending to be something they are not, no matter how good the pretence they put up. As a society we don’t ask people to conceal their religious or political views; as Quakers we always took the opposite stance. Even if ethnicity could be concealed, as a society we wouldn’t suggest it and as Quakers we would be at the forefront of opposition to such a thing. History eloquently records the blighted lives of gay and lesbian people who tried to live as if they were straight, which is why it’s not required any more, and as Quakers we led the way in ending that requirement. It is equally soul-crushing to live in an inauthentic social gender role. Just as life-enhancing to, at last, be able to be one’s true self." (continues)
thefriend.org/article/it-is-soul-crushing-and-miserable-for-anyone-to-live-pretending-to-be-somet