Beyond Gender across Europe
From Amsterdam to Helsinki, one conversation
The protocol was written in the Netherlands. The first countries to walk away from it were Finland and Sweden. Beyond Gender has spoken to the European clinicians, researchers and parents who lived through both, and this site gathers those episodes for listeners on the continent.
The latest episode
28 October 2026
I Was in Women's Prison. Then They Let Men In | Amie Ichikawa
With Amie Ichikawa
A California prison advocate describes what happened when SB 132 let a male inmate into her women's facility, and the policy architecture behind it. For continental European readers, it is a stress test of self-ID logic already debated in Dutch, French, German and EU equality-law circles: once gender identity overrides sex in law, what happens to single-sex institutions designed around physical vulnerability — and who gets asked first.
What this episode means for EuropeEpisodes about Europe
All European episodes
Recent episodes
All episodes
The hosts
An Irish psychotherapist who runs a network across the continent, a researcher who reads the Nordic reviews in the original, and a psychologist at home in Europe's psychoanalytic traditions.
Stella O'Malley in Europe
Host of Beyond Gender, psychotherapist, founder of Genspect
Stella O'Malley runs a global organisation from a small Irish town, and much of its work is on the continent: conferences, clinician networks and conversations with the European doctors who changed their minds.
Mia Hughes
Co-host and researcher
Mia Hughes reads the European guidelines in the original and the Dutch studies in full. On the European episodes she is the co-host who can say exactly what Sweden's Karolinska decided and when.
Dr Bret Alderman
Co-host and psychologist
Bret Alderman is the co-host who asks European guests about the culture of their professions: why Scandinavian psychiatry could change its mind and why others found it so hard.
Why Europe
The gender debate is usually told in English about English-speaking countries. Its most important chapters happened elsewhere: in Amsterdam, where the protocol was born; in Helsinki and Stockholm, where health authorities were the first to read the evidence and change course; in Oslo, Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen, where the reviews are still under way. Beyond Gender talks to the people in those rooms.
About this siteThe evidence, country by country
The sister site beyondgender.eu holds the documents: the Finnish and Swedish reviews, the Norwegian report, the Dutch follow-up studies, the French and German guidance and the European court decisions, each dated and linked to the original. The episodes are the voices; the evidence site is the paperwork.