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 Kerr's story begins not with gender but with sexuality. A gay man from Scotland, he entered gender services at a time when affirmation was the default and exploration was discouraged. In the episode From Gay Man to Transwoman… and Back Again (25 June 2026), he tells Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman how underlying trauma went unexamined, how his homosexuality was effectively sidelined rather than supported, and how transition came to seem like the only available answer — not because it was the right one, but because the clinical system offered nothing else.
What makes Kerr's testimony particularly relevant to Irish listeners is the structural parallel. Ireland's gender services have been undergoing slow, contested reform, and the question of what happens when transition does not resolve a person's distress — let alone how to support someone who wishes to detransition — remains largely unanswered. Kerr describes finding himself, after detransition, without a clinical pathway, without language and without institutional support. That absence is not unique to Scotland.
For Irish GPs, psychotherapists and school counsellors, his account raises a direct challenge: are we asking the questions that gender clinics were not asking? Stella O'Malley, bringing her background as an Irish psychotherapist, presses on exactly those questions throughout the conversation — what was really going on for Michael before referral, and what a genuinely exploratory clinical encounter might have looked like.
Kerr speaks without rancour but with precision, and his willingness to name the ways that gay identity can be obscured within gender narratives makes this episode essential listening for anyone working with young people in Ireland today.
