From Gay Man to Transwoman... and Back Again | Michael Kerr
Michael Kerr's account of transitioning and detransitioning inside the NHS is a story that reaches well beyond Scotland. Across Europe, healthcare systems are confronting the same institutional questions his experience raises: how did gender clinics become environments where underlying trauma went unexamined while medical pathways moved forward unchecked? As Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands tighten clinical standards, Kerr's testimony and his new peer support organisation offer both a warning and a practical model for the continent's growing but still largely unsupported detransitioner community.
Michael Kerr grew up gay in Scotland. In the episode he traces the path that led him, via unresolved trauma, through NHS referrals and gender clinic appointments, to a medical transition he would later come to regret. His story is not sensational — it is, in many ways, quiet and methodical, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to dismiss. Hosted by Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, the conversation gives Kerr the space to reconstruct the sequence of decisions — his own and those of the clinicians around him — that shaped years of his life. What emerges from the first part of the conversation is a portrait of institutional failure at multiple levels. Kerr describes how his GP made a referral without adequate exploration of the difficulties he was experiencing. Clinic appointments, when they came, did not probe the trauma that, in his account, was driving his wish to transition. He recalls that expressions of suicidal distress were not treated as reasons to pause or redirect; they appear to have been absorbed into a process already moving in one direction. The NHS, as Kerr lived it, was not a system capable of asking the harder questions at the right moment. Doubts came gradually. He details how estrogen changed his body, and how, as those physical changes accumulated, he began to feel that the clinical pathway had not served him well. The detransition itself brought its own difficulties: the same NHS infrastructure that had been available during transition offered very little on the way back. He found himself navigating a complex process largely without formal support, without clinical guidance shaped to his specific situation. His response was to build what did not exist. Detransition Pathway UK connects people who are detransitioning with others who have made the same journey, and provides practical resources for a population that remains largely invisible to healthcare planners. Kerr also advocates publicly, including through Detrans Awareness Day and at conferences focused on rethinking youth gender medicine. For European listeners, his account arrives in a particular context. Sweden, Finland and the UK have each conducted formal reviews of gender medicine for minors in recent years, finding insufficient evidence for the pathways being routinely offered. The Netherlands — home to the original clinic protocol that spread across the continent — is reassessing its own approach. France's national academy of medicine has called for caution. Germany is debating new legal frameworks. What these national processes share is a growing recognition that the questions Kerr was never asked — about trauma, about sexuality, about underlying mental health — should have been central from the start. His experience within the NHS is, in personal form, what those reviews have described at a systemic level. And as Europe's detransitioner population grows and becomes more publicly visible, the peer support model he has built in the UK is one that clinicians and policymakers on the continent are beginning to take seriously.
