They were some of the most private emails any mother of a nine-year-old could write. Her son, she said, had fully transitioned from girl to boy but was not coping — fighting fellow pupils, stealing from his parents and in emotional turmoil.

“I have wondered if we have done the right thing — allowing him to transition before accessing the clinic,” she wrote. “But I didn’t feel that I had a choice. He was telling me how much he hated himself and tugging at his clothes.”

In another message, a different mother recounted her trans son’s journey. If she dressed him as a girl, his birth sex, he deliberately wet himself so the nursery would give him boys’ clothes from its reserve supply, she said.