The guests
Irish academics, clinicians and campaigners alongside the international researchers and detransitioners the podcast has spoken to. Every guest page lists that person's episodes.
Adam Coleman
Author and fatherhood advocate
Adam Coleman grew up fatherless in America and turned that wound into a life's work. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, he makes a case that resonates in Ireland, where emigration, institutional trauma and shifting family structures have left many boys without strong paternal presence — with consequences visible in classrooms, courts and mental health services.
Airiel D. Salvatore
Detransitioner and awareness advocate
Airiel D. Salvatore transitioned as a young man, underwent surgery overseas, and later detransitioned after tracing his gender dysphoria to a troubled childhood. He joined Stella O'Malley and her co-hosts on Beyond Gender ahead of Detrans Awareness Day — a conversation that speaks directly to Ireland's still-forming gender-medicine landscape and the question of what genuine psychological care must look like.
Ajay
Butch lesbian and lived-experience speaker
Ajay is a butch lesbian in her sixties who speaks candidly about the road not taken. In The Butch Enigma she reflects on growing up gender non-conforming before medical transition existed as an option — and on the peace she eventually found. For Irish schools and healthcare still learning how to support gender non-conforming girls, her testimony is both a caution and a gift.
Alex Byrne
Professor of philosophy and author
Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at MIT whose work scrutinises the conceptual foundations of sex and gender. On Beyond Gender he joined fellow philosopher Moti Gorin to ask what we actually mean when we call a child transgender — and why that question matters urgently for Irish families, schools, and health services.
Allen Frances
Psychiatrist and DSM-IV Task Force chair
Allen Frances chaired the DSM-IV Task Force and spent decades warning psychiatry against medicalising ordinary human variation. His 2013 book Saving Normal made him a rare insider critic. When Stella O'Malley and her co-hosts turned that same lens on gender dysphoria, the conversation grew unexpectedly tense — raising pointed questions for Ireland's HSE as it grapples with surging referrals and contested care.
Anders Sørensen
Psychiatrist and critical psychiatry advocate
Danish psychiatrist Anders Sørensen challenges the foundations of modern psychiatric practice — questioning diagnosis-led care, the routine misreading of withdrawal as relapse, and the gap between what patients are told and what the evidence actually supports. For Irish listeners navigating an overstretched mental health system, his arguments arrive with uncomfortable familiarity.
Andrew Doyle
Writer, comedian and creator of Titania McGrath
Andrew Doyle — writer, comedian and creator of the Titania McGrath satire — brings his sharp analysis of censorship and ideological conformity to the Beyond Gender podcast. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, he examines how both left and right are narrowing the space for honest debate, a question with urgent implications for Ireland, where the gender discussion has migrated from clinics to classrooms to the Dáil floor.
Bev Jackson
Gay liberation pioneer and LGB Alliance co-founder
Bev Jackson helped found the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and co-founded LGB Alliance in 2019. Her fifty-year arc — from counterculture radical to gender-critical campaigner — holds a direct mirror up to Ireland: the country that led the world in putting same-sex marriage to a popular vote, yet whose LGBTQ+ institutions now follow paths she argues betray the movement's founding purpose.
Carrie Clark
Director of Genspect UK
As Director of Genspect UK, Carrie Clark monitors the institutional machinery behind paediatric gender medicine. When the NHS announced a new puberty blocker trial despite the Cass Review's damning conclusions, she joined Stella O'Malley and Mia Hughes to dissect why that decision should worry Irish parents, clinicians and policymakers just as much as British ones.
Claire Fox
Author, peer and free-speech campaigner
Claire Fox, now Baroness Fox of Buckley, has spent three decades challenging the therapeutic turn in public life — the tendency to reframe political and moral questions as matters of emotional safety. In episode 45 she joins Stella O'Malley to examine how that shift shaped Britain's gender-medicine crisis, and what Ireland can learn before it deepens its own.
Cori Cohn
Detransitioner and gender-medicine reform campaigner
Cori Cohn underwent genital surgery at nineteen in 1994 — three decades before Ireland began its own reckoning with youth gender medicine. Now a prominent activist who has helped shape legislation across more than two dozen US states, he offers Irish listeners a firsthand account that is as legally instructive as it is personally unflinching.
Craig Wiener
Clinical psychologist and author
Craig Wiener is a clinical psychologist whose work challenges over-reliance on psychiatric diagnosis in understanding children's difficulties. His conversation with Stella O'Malley on Beyond Gender carries direct weight for Irish families, schools, and a health system navigating sharply rising referrals for both ADHD and gender dysphoria.
Deanne Jade
Psychologist and founder, National Centre for Eating Disorders
Deanne Jade is a psychologist and founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders. Her decades of clinical work with anorexia have given her a distinctive lens on gender dysphoria: both, she argues, can take the form of an overvalued belief that social reinforcement makes almost impossible to question — an insight with urgent relevance for Irish clinicians and families working without national guidance.
Derrick Jensen
Environmental philosopher and author
Derrick Jensen is an American environmental philosopher, activist, and prolific author best known for his unsparing critique of industrial civilisation. In his Beyond Gender appearance, he traces — with unusual analytical clarity — how the rejection of social norms travelled from anarchist theory into academic queer theory and from there into the mainstream institutions now shaping Irish schools, healthcare, and public policy.
Diana Fleischman
Evolutionary psychologist and academic researcher
Diana Fleischman brings an evolutionary lens to the gender debate that challenges both progressive orthodoxy and knee-jerk dismissal. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, she argues that the unease many Irish people feel around gender ideology is not bigotry but biology — and that understanding disgust as a signal, not a shame, may be essential to an honest national conversation.
Edward Dutton
Evolutionary psychologist and author
Edward Dutton applies evolutionary psychology to the rapid spread of progressive ideology through institutions. For Ireland — which has undergone one of the fastest ideological transformations in Western Europe — his framework raises pointed questions about how schools, healthcare and public debate have shifted, and why so little organised resistance emerged.
Eldur Smári Kristinsson
Chairman, Iceland's Lesbian and Gay Alliance
Iceland seemed to have cracked progressive politics — a small, liberal nation at the LGBTQ+ forefront. Eldur Smári Kristinsson, chairman of Iceland's Lesbian and Gay Alliance, tells a different story. A gay man facing criminal prosecution for questioning gender ideology, he joins Stella O'Malley to describe how Iceland became what he calls a gender Gilead — and what Ireland must learn before it follows.
Ellie
Mother, parental rights witness and campaigner
Ellie is a Ukrainian-born mother living in California whose teenage daughter was removed from her home by child protective services and placed on a gender-transition pathway without her consent. Her story forces Irish parents, social workers and policymakers to confront a question that can no longer be dismissed as American: could this happen here?
Ellie Lee
Professor of Family and Parenting Research
Ellie Lee's research into the medicalisation of parenting speaks directly to Irish parents navigating a healthcare system that has steadily expanded its clinical reach into family life. At a time when parents of gender-questioning children in Ireland are being guided toward early clinical intervention, her analysis of how therapeutic culture reshapes parental judgment carries particular urgency.
Emmet Connor
Irish author and cultural commentator
Emmet Connor is an Irish author who argues that gender ideology cannot be understood in isolation — it is one strand of a broader ideological project rooted in Marxist theory. For Irish audiences watching rapid change move through schools, healthcare and public institutions, his analysis offers a coherent framework for joining the dots.
Eoin Lenihan
Author and institutional researcher
Eoin Lenihan is the author of Vandalising Ireland, a bestselling account of how Ireland's institutions were captured in the decades after the Celtic Tiger. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, he traces the NGO networks and elite structures that have moved Irish public policy — including on gender — far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.
Eric Kaufmann
Political scientist and author
Eric Kaufmann is a political scientist whose work charts how progressive ideology embedded itself in Western institutions over six decades. On Beyond Gender, he argues that the same ideological consensus now visibly unravelling in the United States and United Kingdom was absorbed by Ireland with particular speed — shaping gender policy, school curricula and healthcare in ways that Irish society is only beginning to interrogate.
Erin Friday
Attorney and parental-rights campaigner
Erin Friday is a California attorney who discovered her daughter was being socially transitioned at school — without her consent. Her pushback triggered a Child Protective Services visit. Her daughter has since fully desisted. Friday now campaigns nationally for parental rights in gender medicine — a fight with direct lessons for Irish parents navigating an education and healthcare system shaped by gender-identity policy.
Frank Furedi
Sociologist and author
Frank Furedi is a sociologist and prolific author whose decades of work on therapy culture, fear, and the erosion of adult authority make him one of Europe's most rigorous critics of institutional conformism. His conversation with Stella O'Malley on Beyond Gender is essential listening for Ireland — a country that has embedded gender-identity frameworks into schools and public institutions with remarkable speed.
Gary Clark
Evolutionary biologist and field anthropologist
Gary Clark is an Australian evolutionary biologist who spent years living alongside Aboriginal communities before turning his scientific lens on the gender debate. His case — that biological sex is a universal human reality inscribed in four million years of fossil evidence, not a right-wing invention — arrives as Irish universities and public institutions face strikingly similar ideological pressures.
Gerald Posner
Pulitzer finalist, investigative journalist and author
Gerald Posner has spent decades investigating the pharmaceutical industry's darkest corners. In his Beyond Gender appearance, he draws a stark parallel between the opioid crisis — which devastated communities across Ireland and the world — and the financial machinery now driving the trans medical industry. His question is blunt: who profits when children become lifelong patients, and why won't journalists ask it?
Gordon Guyatt
Clinical epidemiologist and evidence-based medicine pioneer
Gordon Guyatt coined the term 'evidence-based medicine' in 1991 and spent decades teaching clinicians worldwide how to evaluate research rigorously. Yet when it came to paediatric gender medicine, he signed advocacy statements endorsing these treatments as medically necessary — without reading them carefully. His candid admission on the Beyond Gender podcast raises urgent questions for Irish healthcare and policymakers.
Graham Linehan
Television writer and gender-critical campaigner
Dublin-born creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan is one of Ireland's most celebrated comedy writers — and, since around 2018, one of its most polarising public voices. His decision to speak out against gender ideology cost him his career and much else besides, making his story a pointed case study for a country now having the same arguments he was cancelled for raising.
Gurwinder Bhogal
Essayist and cultural commentator
Gurwinder Bhogal is a British writer whose Substack newsletter, The Prism, has earned an international following for its psychologically sharp essays on belief and bias. He has appeared twice on the Beyond Gender podcast, joining Stella O'Malley to explore why intelligent people failed to scrutinise gender ideology — and what social media is doing to Irish children.
Holly Lawford-Smith
Political philosopher and gender-critical feminist
Holly Lawford-Smith is a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne whose book Gender-Critical Feminism brought rare academic rigour to one of today's most contested debates. For Irish listeners, her framework for understanding what 'woman' means provides essential grounding at a time when the Gender Recognition Act and related policies continue to reshape Irish law, healthcare and schools.
Ian Cox
Psychologist, lecturer and dissenting voice
Ian Cox is an Irish psychologist and lecturer who paid a professional price for questioning the direction of his own field. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, he maps how postmodernist and activist-led thinking has reshaped psychology and counselling training in Ireland — and what that means for practitioners, clients and the institutions that train them.
J.D. Haltigan
Developmental psychologist and researcher
J.D. Haltigan is a developmental psychologist whose work on ideological capture within academic psychology has direct bearing on how Irish clinicians are trained, how Irish schools are advised and how Irish health policy is shaped. His Beyond Gender appearance brought a forensic empirical rigour to questions that Irish practitioners and parents are navigating right now.
Jaco van Zyl
South African psychotherapist and writer
Jaco van Zyl is a South African psychotherapist who argues that a generation raised on gratification over duty — and on subjective truth over shared reality — is paying a steep psychological price. His work carries particular urgency in Ireland, where adolescent mental health referrals have surged and a culture of therapeutic over-validation has quietly reshaped how schools, clinics and families respond to distress.
James Lindsay
Mathematician, author and founder of New Discourses
James Lindsay is an American mathematician turned cultural critic whose analyses of 'woke' ideology — and its roots in critical theory — have made him one of the most referenced voices in gender-critical and education debates worldwide. His Beyond Gender appearance brings that analysis to bear on Ireland, where the same ideological currents are reshaping schools, healthcare and public institutions.
James Linehan
Advocate and lived-experience voice
James Linehan was born with hypogonadism, a condition that denied him natural puberty. His unflinching account of the emotional, social and physical cost of that absence speaks directly to Ireland's debate about puberty-suppressing medication — and to every Irish parent or clinician trying to understand what suppressing adolescent development actually does to a young person.
Jamie Reed
Gender clinic whistleblower and case manager
Jamie Reed spent nearly five years as a case manager inside one of the largest paediatric gender clinics in the United States before speaking out about what she witnessed. Her account — and the clinic's subsequent closure to minors — makes her one of the most consequential insiders to have gone public. For Ireland, still designing its own services for gender-questioning young people, her testimony demands close attention.
Jasmin Faulk
Writer and commentator on gender and dissent
Jasmin Faulk grew up inside a system of enforced gender rules — the strict segregation of life in Saudi Arabia — before building a new life in the United States. Her conversation with Stella O'Malley and the Beyond Gender team draws a direct line from religious authoritarianism to the silencing she encounters in Western progressive spaces, an argument that lands differently for Irish listeners who have lived through their own ideological reckoning.
Jill Escher
Autism researcher and NCSA president
Jill Escher discovered that her mother was given synthetic steroid hormones during pregnancy and has spent years investigating whether such prenatal exposure underlies surging rates of autism and gender dysphoria. Her findings carry pointed resonance for Ireland, where women received the same drugs in the same era — and where medical institutions have been equally slow to reckon with the consequences.
Jon Mills
Philosopher, psychoanalyst and author
Dr Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst who found himself blacklisted by his own professional body for questioning dominant orthodoxies — a story with direct implications for Irish therapists navigating an increasingly ideologically policed profession. His conversation with Stella O'Malley cuts to the heart of what happens when dissent is treated as a safeguarding threat.
Jonathan Kay
Canadian journalist, author and editor
Jonathan Kay is a Canadian journalist who has spent years documenting how liberal democracies drift into ideological conformity. His conversation with Stella O'Malley on Beyond Gender drew sharp parallels between Canada's experience and Ireland's own — two countries shaped by institutional trauma, a deferential media, and institutions that replaced one form of moral unanimity with another.
Jonni Skinner
Detransitioner and advocate
Jonni Skinner was thirteen years old when a US gender clinic placed him on cross-sex oestrogen — following what he now describes as a fabricated diagnosis, falsified records, and institutional intimidation of his mother. His testimony as a detransitioner, and as an autistic young person failed by the system, speaks directly to the safeguarding questions now facing Ireland's emerging gender services.
Joseph Figliolia
Healthcare policy researcher, Manhattan Institute
Joseph Figliolia investigates how medical institutions adopt contested clinical policies without independently evaluating the evidence. His research into the endorsement of paediatric gender medicine by the Texas Medical Association exposes a structural problem that Irish listeners will recognise in the HSE and Ireland's own professional bodies: deference dressed up as consensus.
Joshua Slocum
Podcast host and writer on narcissism
Joshua Slocum hosts the Disaffected podcast and writes about how Cluster B personality patterns — narcissism, borderline dynamics, performative victimhood — have migrated from dysfunctional households into public institutions. For Irish listeners watching one orthodoxy replace another at speed, his diagnosis cuts uncomfortably close to home.
Katy Faust
Children's rights advocate and author
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a global children's rights organisation that puts the child's perspective at the centre of debates on surrogacy, donor conception and divorce. Her work arrives at a pivotal moment for Ireland, a country mid-way through implementing landmark assisted reproduction legislation and still reckoning with the shape of family law.
Keira Bell
Detransitioner, campaigner and legal pioneer
Keira Bell took the UK's National Health Service to court over the puberty blockers she was prescribed as a teenager — and changed the conversation about youth gender medicine across the English-speaking world. Her story, told to Stella O'Malley on the Beyond Gender podcast, holds a particular urgency for Ireland, where equivalent safeguards have been slow to materialise.
Kenneth Zucker
Psychologist and paediatric gender dysphoria researcher
Kenneth Zucker spent forty years running North America's first paediatric gender clinic before activists lobbied him out of his post. His settlement, his data and his dismissal are a case study in what happens when clinical evidence collides with ideological capture — and Ireland, still shaping its youth gender service, cannot afford to ignore it.
Kristopher Kaliebe
Child and forensic psychiatry professor
Dr Kris Kaliebe is a US professor of child and forensic psychiatry whose work asks hard questions about his own profession. He argues that psychiatry's turn away from psychotherapy — and its deepening entanglement with pharmaceutical companies — created the intellectual conditions in which medicalising young people's gender distress became not just possible, but routine.
Laoise de Brún
Barrister, documentary-maker and women's rights campaigner
Laoise de Brún brings a rare combination to Irish women's rights advocacy: the storytelling instinct of a seasoned BBC and Channel 4 documentary-maker, the forensic discipline of a barrister, and the organising drive behind The Countess, the group she founded to defend sex-based rights in Ireland. Her work sits at the intersection of law, media and grassroots activism.
Leor Sapir
Manhattan Institute fellow and policy analyst
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Leor Sapir is one of the most forensic critics of gender-affirming care policy in the United States. His ability to name the structural forces behind institutional evasion makes his work directly relevant to Ireland, where the same patterns of manufactured consensus have shaped healthcare, schools, and public debate.
Lionel Shriver
Novelist and cultural critic
Lionel Shriver is the American-born, London-based author of We Need to Talk About Kevin and Mania, and one of the Anglophone world's most unsparing critics of gender ideology. She has appeared twice on Beyond Gender, making the case that Ireland's rapid institutional consensus is a warning, not a model.
Louise Irvine
UK GP and Co-Chair of CAN-SG
Louise Irvine is a British GP and Co-Chair of CAN-SG, one of the most prominent clinical voices calling for an evidence-based rethink of youth gender medicine. As Ireland weighs the lessons of the NHS, her testimony — grounded in frontline experience and institutional courage — carries urgent weight for Irish parents, clinicians and policymakers.
Lucy Beney
Counsellor, researcher and Thoughtful Therapists member
Lucy Beney spent five years counselling teenagers inside a large British state secondary school before stepping back from clinical work to research and expose how gender-identity ideology has reshaped the therapy profession. On Beyond Gender she offered Irish listeners a precise account of the UK playbook now heading straight for Ireland's conversion therapy debate.
Malcolm Clark
Documentary maker and writer
Malcolm Clark is a documentary maker and writer whose work scrutinises how ideological currents reshape clinical practice. In conversation with Stella O'Malley on Beyond Gender, he brings a filmmaker's rigour to a question Ireland's gender services cannot avoid: when does paraphilic desire cross the line into medical justification for irreversible intervention?
Marcus Evans
Psychoanalyst and Tavistock whistleblower
Marcus Evans spent decades as a psychoanalyst inside the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust — home to the world's largest youth gender clinic. His 2019 resignation as a Trust governor, in direct protest at the handling of gender medicine, made him one of the earliest senior clinical insiders to raise the alarm. For Irish listeners, his testimony carries immediate weight as Ireland builds its own paediatric gender pathways.
Mary McAlister
Senior litigation counsel and parental rights attorney
Mary McAlister is Senior Litigation Counsel for the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, an American legal organisation that takes schools to court over the secret social transition of children. Her conversation with Stella O'Malley arrives at a critical moment for Ireland, where parental notification policies in schools remain contested and the influence of gender ideology on education is only beginning to be examined.
Meghan Murphy
Feminist journalist and Feminist Current founder
Meghan Murphy is the Canadian feminist writer who founded Feminist Current and became one of the first high-profile voices permanently banned from Twitter for stating that men are not women. Her story carries sharp resonance in Ireland, where proposed hate speech legislation has raised serious concerns that biological reality may become legally unsayable.
Melissa
Mother and medical harm witness
When Melissa's son Jonni was thirteen, a social worker invoked suicide risk to override her hesitation, and doctors placed him on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The health damage that followed was denied by those responsible. Her account speaks directly to Irish parents whose instincts are being overridden by clinical systems with little accountability.
Michael Gurian
Family therapist, author and educator
Michael Gurian has spent three decades mapping the neurological differences between male and female brains — and arguing that ignoring them comes at a cost. For Irish listeners grappling with boys' disengagement in school, rising gender distress in adolescents, and a counselling culture shaped by social-constructionist assumptions, his work offers a grounded, biologically informed alternative.
Michael Kerr
Gay detransitioner and public speaker
Michael Kerr is a Scottish man who identified as gay, transitioned to live as a transwoman, and later detransitioned. His account of navigating NHS gender services — marked by unaddressed trauma, absent safeguarding and no pathway back — carries urgent lessons for Ireland, where similar systemic gaps are only beginning to be examined.
Michael Nayna
Documentary filmmaker and media critic
Australian filmmaker Michael Nayna documented the Grievance Studies Affair from the inside, capturing the moment academic peer review buckled under ideological pressure. His conversation with Stella O'Malley on Beyond Gender asks an urgent question for Irish listeners: if the same institutional groupthink that captured British and American universities has quietly arrived here, who in Ireland is willing to say so — and what happens to them when they do?