Informed Dissent

This week Jamie sits down with Michael Pizzullo, LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist in West Hollywood and the creator of the YouTube channel Therapy for Gay Men . Michael’s clinical work centers on trauma and addiction among gay men, including chemsex. This summer, after Matthew Vines’s New York Times essay “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters” set off a pile-on, Michael posted that he felt...

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. This week we go state by state, east to west, through the ballot measures voters will decide on girls’ sports, pediatric gender medicine, and parents’ rights. Our guests: * Maine: Leyland Streiff, Maine Girl Dads / Protect Girls Sports * Missouri: Amanda Sanders, Her Health, Her Future (Amendment 3) * Nebraska: Sen. Kathleen Kauth (Initiative 442, Fairness for...

Independent journalist Andy Ngo joins Jamie Reed, and Cori Cohn to discuss his new book, The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult (Center Street, October 13, 2026). Ngo traces how Jack LaSota, known as “Ziz,” went from a promising engineering career to the Bay Area rationalist scene, and built a group blending rationalism, radical veganism, and trans grievance politics that is now linked to at least...

On September 23, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on protecting women’s sports. Former Stanford goalkeeper and professional soccer player Carly Smolak testified alongside Kim Jones of ICONS and attorney William Bock. When it came time for questions, not a single Democratic senator stayed in the room to ask her anything. We think her story deserves to be heard in full. This episode ope...

In this episode, Jamie Reed and Cori Cohn sit down with Mia Hughes to discuss REPATH, Genspect’s new campaign to restore a psychological approach to gender distress. The REPATH campaign can be found here. In 2022, WPATH’s Standards of Care 8 finished a long shift in how gender distress is understood. It used to be treated as a psychological symptom to explore. Now it’s treated as an identity to af...

Killed by the In-Laws, Meta’s Body Dysmorphia Reckoning, The Last Ditch This week Jamie Reed and Lauren Leggieri take on two stories that you want more details on. Segment 1: The killing of Jonathan McKinsey Jonathan McKinsey, 40, director of engineering for New York Times Games, was shot dead on September 26 in a Dublin, California, park parking lot. Her in-laws, both 77, are charged with murder...

Simon LeVay is a British-born neuroscientist who has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He achieved international fame with a 1991 Science paper that reported on a difference in the structure of the hypothalamus between gay and straight men, a study that helped trigger an avalanche of new biological research into sexual orientation. Sin...

Jamie, Lauren, and Cori talk with evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright about a new HHS-commissioned study he co-authored, “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” The survey of 1,208 U.S. adults found that agreement with mainstream “gender-affirming” clinical guidance (APA, WPATH, AAP) correlates strongly with...

Jamie Reed sits down with two leaders from Themis Resource Fund to discuss the organization’s work connecting detransitioners with attorneys willing to take their cases, the funding and logistical challenges of building litigation against gender-medicine providers, and what it takes to pursue accountability through the courts. Named after the Greek goddess of justice, Themis has become a central p...

Our final episode addressing public libraries and gender ideology takes us into an organization that was created “In April of 2023, a small group of librarians from various regions across the country initiated virtual discussions regarding the potential establishment of a new professional library organization. Their motivations stemmed from a perceived shift in the library profession towards what...

Welcome to part two of our Library Series. If you missed part 1, it aired last week. Part 1 was about the books themselves. This week we are joined by a guest: John Chrastka is co-founder and executive director of EveryLibrary, the national political action committee for libraries, and the EveryLibrary Institute, a public policy and tax policy think tank for libraries. Since 2012, EveryLibrary has...

We’re kicking off a three-part series — Overdue: Libraries and the Gender Ideology Reckoning — looking at how gender ideology moved into America’s public libraries, and what it will take to move it back out. Part 1 is about the books themselves. Part 2 goes to the boardroom. Part 3 is about what you can actually do about it. This week, we start where the story starts: the shelf. Guest: James LaRue...

This week: Trojan horses, teal handguns, and a stand-your-ground laws in Wyoming. Jamie Reed, Cori Cohn, and Lauren Leggieri are back together again, with two stories that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, except that both involve someone pretending to be someone they are not. First up: Christopher Nolan finally releases his $250 million, IMAX-shot, five-years-in-the-making Odyssey —...

This week, Jamie sits down with Cynthia Dill — a Maine civil rights attorney, former Democratic state legislator, and 2012 U.S. Senate candidate — to talk about the case that’s put her at odds with her own party. Dill represented the House and Senate districts covering Cape Elizabeth, South Portland, and part of Scarborough during six years in the Maine Legislature. She ran statewide against Angus...

Informed Dissent — Show Notes, Week of August 1, 2026 In this episode: LeAnne and Cori hold down the fort while Jamie and Lauren are on vacation, covering the Sophie Cunningham/WNBA firestorm, cracks in Democratic Party unity across two swing-state races, and new data on pediatric gender diagnoses in Oregon. Sophie Cunningham & the WNBA rallies * Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham (a Missouri n...

James Esses — psychotherapist, former criminal barrister, founder of Just Therapy, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, founder/coordinator of the Declaration for Biological Reality, Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, University of Buckingham. Jamie, Lauren, and Cori are joined by James Esses ahead of the July 26th High Court judicial review of the PATHWAYS puberty blocker...

This week on Informed Dissent, Jamie Reed sits down with Maya Forstater to talk conversion therapy law, the puberty blocker trial, and Amnesty International. About Maya Forstater Maya Forstater is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Sex Matters. She became a public figure after losing her job at the Center for Global Development over her tweets on sex and gender — the resulting employment tr...

Closing out Pride month, Cori Cohn and Lauren Leggieri sit down with pseudonymous writer Jack of Shadows — a cancelled public health professional, gay man, and contributor to our Substack — for a real conversation from inside the LGB about what happens when trans and queer politics collide with gay life. The conversation centers on “Odd Girls Out: Trans-Identified Women in Gay Male Spaces (Part 3:...

On today’s episode, Jamie Reed moderates a roundtable discussing the Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox. At the table: Cori Cohn — co-host of Informed Dissent, who has testified in many states on this exact issue. Kara Dansky — attorney and author of The Abolition of Sex and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. She’s a former AC...

In This Episode We open with Lauren and Cori on Pride, the Endocrine Society’s annual conference, and the question nobody wants to answer: who is welcomed at Pride anymore? Then Jamie sits down with Dr. Leonard Sax — physician, psychologist, and author — to pull apart one of the most consequential statistical fabrications in the gender medicine literature: the claim that 1.7% of human births are i...

Episode Summary In Part Two of our conversation with Dr. Kenneth Zucker, we continue exploring what decades of clinical research actually shows about gender dysphoria in children and adolescents — and what gets lost when ideology replaces evidence. Dr. Zucker is a certified psychologist based in Toronto, Editor-in-Chief of Archives of Sexual Behavior , and one of the most cited researchers in this...

This week it’s just Jamie Reed — this weekend is the Endocrine Society’s annual conference in Chicago, so Headlines and the usual roundtable are off, and we’ll be back at full strength next week. In the meantime, you can stay current with our weekly news: every week the LGB Courage Coalition publishes a roundup of the stories that matter in gender medicine, science, and policy — the headlines you...

In This Episode Jamie Reed and Cori Cohn open the episode with analysis of the May 21 Senate HELP Committee hearing, Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors , then turn to a new think tank brief counseling trans advocates to accept defeat on youth medical transition. Jamie closes the episode with her recorded conversation with Dr. Kennet...

Last week, Informed Dissent released covertly recorded audio from inside two sessions at the 2026 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco — audio that was leaked to us, and that we believe the public has every right to hear. This week, Jamie, Lauren, and Cori sit down to discuss what’s on those recordings and what it tells us about the current state of psychiatry’s relatio...

Informed Dissent This Week’s Episode Maine is a blue state — Democratic governor, Democratic legislature, transgender sanctuary state. And yet Protect Girls Sports in Maine gathered more than 70,000 signatures to put a sex-based sports and spaces question on the November ballot — nearly all of them from volunteers. This week, as this episode airs, the effort is in crisis: yesterday, Maine’s Chief...