Susan Bradley
Child psychiatrist and gender identity specialist
Dr Susan Bradley spent nearly five decades at a Toronto gender clinic whose influence reached far beyond Canada. For European listeners, her testimony carries particular weight: the Dutch Protocol she critiques was developed in Amsterdam and exported to clinics across Sweden, Finland, Germany and France, shaping how a generation of children was treated on this continent.
Susan Bradley is a Canadian child and adolescent psychiatrist who spent nearly five decades at what is now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, where she was a founding figure of the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity Clinic. Her work produced one of the longest-running outcome records for gender-dysphoric children in the world. She co-authored the landmark volume Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents (1996), codifying the evidence base her clinic had built over decades.
Bradley chaired the DSM-IV subcommittee on gender identity, placing her at the centre of the psychiatric profession's effort to define and categorise gender dysphoria as the modern clinical frameworks were being written. Her clinical model emphasised careful, exploratory therapy over early intervention: most gender-dysphoric children who passed through her clinic desisted during or after adolescence, typically identifying as gay or lesbian adults. She regarded this not as a failure of treatment but as the natural outcome of a developmental process that required time and space, not foreclosure.
For European audiences, Bradley's account is inseparable from the history of the Dutch Protocol — developed at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam and exported across the continent, underpinning gender services in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, France and beyond. As EU member states review or restrict those services in the wake of the Cass Review and accumulating desistance data, Bradley represents the clinical tradition the Dutch model displaced: watch, wait, and follow the child.
In The Truth Gender Clinicians Tried to Ignore (episode 43, Beyond Gender, October 2025), she joins hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to explain what she believes went catastrophically wrong — how outcome data was suppressed, dissent was marginalised, and a profession lost sight of the children it was supposed to serve. Essential listening for any European clinician, policymaker or parent trying to understand how we arrived at this moment of reckoning.
