'How anyone feels can’t be argued with; it’s their reality.' Photo: iStock.com/MHJ.
‘It is soul-crushing and miserable for anyone to live pretending to be something they are not.’
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.
