I'm in the U.S. and I just called up my primary care physician and asked them to refer me to an endocrinologist for gender dysphoria. No therapist was required, a letter was only required for surgery. I just wonder if you might be in the UK or somewhere else, where the requirements are different.

Either way, I would talk to your therapist about the need to start HRT ASAP and get that ball rolling, no reason to wait.

And regarding detransition: where is the evidence that the rates are higher than they are? This is just asking us to ignore evidence in favor of speculation ... And it's hilarious that they then claim that the wait ensures reduced regret and detransition rates - which is it, is the wait effective at preventing detransition and the rates are low (as we know they are), or is it actually the case that loads of people are detransitioning that we have no evidence for like originally argued?

This makes no sense to me.

The way to walk through someone arguing for trans-specific gatekeeping is to walk through the same scenarios for cis people and ask why their regrets don't matter and why only trans regret matters. Teenagers can get breast augmentations or reductions without forced wait times. Cis people can get on puberty blockers for precocious puberty, and it's even becoming a pseudoscience fad for young men to take testosterone under misconceptions that testosterone is waning and they need exogenous sources to make them manly enough. Again, no gatekeeping, cis people have free access to gender affirming care.

Pretty soon it's obvious the rules that are only for trans people are because they are trans, and not because there is a good, medical reason for it. This is also why informed consent is used now and why WPATH doesn't require forced wait times for starting HRT, etc. and yet the detransition rate hasn't suddenly exploded.

It just turns out, cis people don't tend to want to take cross-sex hormones, and even if they do, they find out quickly it isn't great for them.

The evidence we have is that of the few who detransition, they usually do so not because they're cis but because they don't have support from their family and society - transition is too difficult so they detransition because they don't have enough support.

EDIT: some actual evidence:

https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

4. Regrets following gender transition are extremely rare and have become even rarer as both surgical techniques and social support have improved. Pooling data from numerous studies demonstrates a regret rate ranging from .3 percent to 3.8 percent. Regrets are most likely to result from a lack of social support after transition or poor surgical outcomes using older techniques.