‘How could I remove my healthy breasts when I’d seen my mother lose one of hers to cancer?” asks Charlie Evans. Until recently, the science writer from Margate identified as transgender, convinced, along with increasing numbers of young women, that she had been born in the wrong body.

After undergoing a ‘social transition’, for which she changed her name from Charlotte, as well as her pronouns, her passport and driving licence, in order to live as her chosen sex, she refused to go through with the gender reassignment operation that would give her the sexual characteristics she thought she wanted.

But earlier this year, at 28, she faced coming out for a third time in her life: having announced in her youth that she was a lesbian, then trans – now, finally, she is a ‘detransitioner’.

It’s a phenomenon that’s almost as new as transgenderism itself – but one that the movement in Britain rather you didn’t talk about.

Charlie says there were a series of epiphanies that lead to her not so much coming out, but going back in. It was around the age of six that she convinced herself she was actually a boy. “I liked football, I liked trucks, I liked girls,” she says, “therefore I was a boy.”

This was no mere childhood phase, one that would fade faster than an obsession with One Direction. Charlie now realises, after extensive therapy, that the feelings of gender dysphoria that developed were the result of what she is only willing to describe as “abuse” outside the family.

It began when she was eight and cemented within her a loathing of her female body. “The trauma exacerbated and accelerated feelings that were natural for a child who didn’t conform that, I now see, I would have outgrown,” she says.