Beyond Gender

In 1975, Dr. Susan Bradley founded Toronto’s first gender clinic for children at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. For nearly five decades, she treated over 400 gender-dysphoric children and chaired the DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders. The pattern she observed was impossible to ignore: “Even the ones who’ve gone through some of this and come out in our clinic, they’re nearly all gay or lesbian.” Now, in her eighties, she’s speaking out about what went wrong.

🚨 15 years after WPATH's 2010 de-psychopathologization campaign, Genspect launches the counter-campaign to restore psychiatric safeguards Mia Hughes and Stella O'Malley explain why recognizing the drive for extreme body modification as pathological is the most compassionate, evidence-based response to protect vulnerable youth from the harms of WPATH's de-psychopathologization.The Critical Distinction: A teen exploring trans identity? Not pathological. A teen obsessively fixated on removing healthy body parts, pursuing lifelong medicalization, destroying their endocrine system? That's pathological behavior requiring mental health support—not celebration and scalpels. "You could develop a trans identity and not want any medical interventions. And arguably your behavior is not yet pathological. It's when you're going into actual harmful medical interventions that are going to harm your body. Now your behavior is pathological." - Stella O'MalleyWhat Happened: In 2010, WPATH's de-psychopathologization campaign declared trans identities "natural and healthy," dismantled all psychiatric guardrails, and triggered a social contagion among youth. By 2013, the DSM-5 replaced "Gender Identity Disorder" with "Gender Dysphoria"—the identity was now healthy, only the distress was pathological. By 2018, the WHO's ICD-11 went further, moving it entirely out of mental health into "conditions related to sexual health."The result? Kids started falling into an ideological abyss with no safeguards to catch them.Campaign hub: https://genspect.org/re-psychopathologization-campaign/

Episode #41

At 34 years old, Sall Grover thought she was creating a simple solution to a common problem. After years of sexual harassment as a screenwriter in Hollywood, she and her parents developed Giggle—a women-only app for roommates, freelance work, and lesbian dating. Using facial recognition technology, the app verified users were female before granting access. Apple and Google approved every build throughout 2019 without question. Then came February 7th, 2020, and Sall’s life became a legal nightmare that would span five years and counting.

At 13 years old, Jonni Skinner was diagnosed with a fake endocrine disorder and put on cross-sex hormones. At 14, he was misdiagnosed with "tall stature" and given higher doses to stunt his growth. The same doctors who threatened to remove him from his home if his mother didn't comply also falsified his medical records and sent him to sex shops for "treatment supplies." Eight years later, Jonni is speaking out about a medical scandal that turned vulnerable children into experimental subjects. This isn't just malpractice—it's systematic abuse disguised as healthcare, and Jonni's story exposes how the gender medicine industry operates in the shadows.See Jonni at The Bigger Picture: https://genspect.org/the-bigger-picture-albuquerque/Jonni Skinner spent eight years believing he was transgender after being medicalized at 13. Born in rural Michigan to a religious family, Jonni was diagnosed with high-functioning autism at 4 and struggled with being a feminine boy in a conservative environment. When puberty began triggering severe body dysmorphia and religious guilt about his attraction to males, his mother sought help at the University of Michigan's gender clinic. What followed was a systematic campaign of medical abuse that would steal Jonni's adolescence and leave lasting physical and psychological damage.

In this engaging discussion, guest Glenna Goldis, a consumer protection lawyer and founder of Gender Critical Lawyers, reveals the cracks in the gender medicine system in the U.S. She highlights significant legal victories and the deception behind medical practices related to pediatric transition. Glenna calls for accountability, including potential Nuremberg-style trials for those involved in child abuse disguised as care. With insights into critical court cases and the need for clearer definitions in the discussion of gender identity, this chat is a crucial primer on a contentious issue.

Why do so many fathers vanish from their children's lives? Adam Coleman argues it starts at birth - without holding their babies in those first crucial months, men never develop the chemical bond that keeps them present. The result: boys without fathers become men who can't regulate emotions, swinging from zero to a hundred over minor slights, filling prisons and chasing external validation through money and women. This conversation explores the uncomfortable truth that teaching boys emotional regulation might be a father's most critical role - and why figures like Andrew Tate appeal to a generation of men who never learned the difference between internal worth and external validation.

Dr. Gordon Guyatt revolutionized modern medicine. As a professor at McMaster University, he coined the term "evidence-based medicine" in 1991, created the hierarchy of evidence that every medical student learns, and wrote the User's Guide to the Medical Literature that taught physicians worldwide how to critically evaluate research. For 48 years, he's been the gold standard for rigorous scientific thinking in healthcare.Then came his systematic reviews of pediatric gender medicine. His team found only low-quality evidence for youth interventions. When twenty U.S. states used his work to restrict access to these treatments, Guyatt called it "egregious, unconscionable misuse of our work." But in this explosive interview, he admits signing a statement endorsing "medically necessary care for gender diverse youth" without reading it carefully. "That was not my paragraph, and I didn't read carefully enough," he confesses. When pressed further: "I was a dope. Okay. I'm sometimes a dope."

Premieres Thursday

Soren Aldaco was 11 when she discovered online fandom spaces where roleplay identities could become real identities—and 19 when a double mastectomy at the notorious Crane Center left her with massive hematomas the surgeons denied were happening. Now a detrans woman, graduate student, and Independent Women's Forum Ambassador, she's fighting for her case against Texas medical malpractice laws to reach the Supreme Court. In this conversation, she unpacks how "fantasy and reality" merged online, why every provider who pushed her toward medicalization had trans-identified family members, and what it means to survive both the physical complications and the ideological capture that enabled them. Soren will be speaking at Genspect’s upcoming Bigger Picture conference in Albuquerque.Support the show.