Beyond Gender, from Ireland
The gender debate, heard from County Offaly
Beyond Gender is recorded in Ireland by an Irish psychotherapist, and Ireland keeps coming up: the HSE, the National Gender Service, the schools, the Oireachtas. This site gathers the episodes and guests that matter most to Irish listeners.
The latest episode
5 November 2026
Female prisoners were subjected to sterilization procedures without informed consent.
This episode looks at the historical practice of sterilising female prisoners without their informed consent, a scandal that strips women of bodily autonomy inside institutions meant to hold power over them. For Irish listeners, the story lands close to home: Ireland has its own long record of institutions overriding women's consent, from the Magdalene Laundries to psychiatric wards. Stella O'Malley, an Irish psychotherapist, situates the episode within the podcast's wider concern that medicine too easily proceeds without proper consent, a worry she says applies just as much to gender clinics treating Irish teenagers today as it does to prisons.
What this episode means for IrelandEpisodes about Ireland
All Irish episodes
Recent episodes
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The hosts
An Irish psychotherapist, an English researcher in Canada and an American psychologist. Ireland is where the podcast is made.
Stella O'Malley, an Irish voice
Psychotherapist in County Offaly and host of Beyond Gender
Stella O'Malley practises as a psychotherapist in the Irish midlands and has been, for most of a decade, the best-known Irish clinician willing to question the affirmative approach to gender in public.
Mia Hughes
Co-host and researcher
Mia Hughes is the Beyond Gender co-host who turns an Irish anecdote into a question about documents: what the HSE guideline says, what the clinic's own audit found, what the international bodies Ireland defers to were saying in private.
Dr Bret Alderman
Co-host and psychologist
Bret Alderman is the American psychologist on the panel, and for Irish listeners he is the outsider's eye: the co-host who notices what is distinctively Irish about an Irish story.
Why Ireland
Ireland passed self-identification into law in 2015 with almost no debate, and has been living with the consequences since: a gender service in dispute with its own referrers, schools without guidance, a political class that would rather not revisit the question. Beyond Gender is one of the few Irish platforms that talks about any of it for longer than a radio segment.
About this siteThe facts behind the episodes
Conversations are one thing; the record is another. The sister site beyondgender.ie holds the Irish dossiers, the timeline from the Gender Recognition Act to today and the primary sources: the Acts, the HSE documents, the judgments. Use the two together.