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Notes -
While it's nowhere near as common as the early 00s (where "spend six months figuring yourself out" was the WPATH recommendation), and most of the more cautious stories are from more Red Tribe areas, there are still some times where this does happen, both for legitimate reasons and for sometimes overcautious ones. The current keyword is "mental readiness", but it seems to change every couple years and I'd expect that to continue.
((The flip side is that the last twenty years of political everything about this means that people build tools to work around it, so the people who most worry about are going to gravitate to the shrinks who advertise about questioning the least. Which isn't the same as the people who most need to be questioned, but thanks to BPD and psychosis has at least a little overlap.))
I think the pendulum overcorrected, but there's reasons you'll still see gatekeeping mentioned in trans-heavy spaces, and it's not just exaggeration or memory.
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