A therapist needed to question the patient’s understanding of gender in order to determine why the patient might have fixated on that as a source of their problems. What beliefs did the patient have about boys or girls? Why did the child or adolescent come to believe changing gender would lead to a happier life? The goal of the questioning was often to challenge the notion that biological sex was the source of the patient’s problem and, wherever possible, to alleviate the dysphoria.
