Years of inner life come before any clinical step
Dr Helen Webberley on Robby Starbuck: transition and children, Robby Starbuck
Trans people arrive at their identity quickly, or on a whim. The assumption is that someone hears about transition, decides it sounds appealing, and acts on it before they have really thought it through.
What I was trying to say there is that the clinical step, if it ever comes, is almost always the last thing that happens, not the first. Before anyone says a word out loud, there are years of private life: questioning, testing the idea against reality, weighing what it would cost them, wondering whether the world will treat them as a person or as a threat. That interior journey is long and often lonely, and it is the part nobody sees. By the time someone is sitting in front of a doctor, they have usually known themselves for a very long time. The idea that they need someone else to confirm or correct that knowledge gets it exactly backwards. Nobody is better placed to understand a person's identity than that person.
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