Agree to Disagree About Gender

James Linehan is a writer and researcher who focuses on the evidence behind adolescent puberty suppression, a subject he also knows from his own life. He was born with hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, a condition that left his body unable to make its own sex hormones. He went through a medically induced puberty at the University of California, San Francisco, beginning at age 16. He holds an MA in Ed...

At the time of release, it is one day before we learn the results of the 2026 US mid-term elections for the US House and Senate. Trans issues have again been front and centre this election cycles, with Republican candidates having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to try to paint the Democrats as being out of touch with the electorate on touchstone issues where trans rights appe...

This week, we are joined by Steph Richards, a trans woman in her 70s who is the founder and chair of Translucent UK, a trans-led UK advocacy and human rights organization whose mission is to advance the visibility, social acceptance, legal recognition and healthcare of transgender and gender-diverse people. Through this organization recently has been focused on preserving the accommodations which...

Miranda Yardley transitioned in the late 2000s, but by 2014 had become one of the earliest and prominent trans people in the UK to speak out against the excesses of "trans ideology" and in doing so, became a unique voice, a gender apostate embracing gender criticality. Over the years, she has written both in her own blogs and in prominent publications, and has appeared in mainstream media and podc...

Dr. Hodkinson is a UK-based general practitioner who has become a leading physician-advocate for gender critical causes, particularly on the intersection of trans identities and medicine. She and several other like minded UK-based physicians founded Biology in Medicine, where they posted anonymously out of concern that they would face social sanction from their colleagues and community for embraci...

In 2015, one of the world’s best-known researchers of childhood gender dysphoria lost the clinic he had led for more than three decades. Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health closed its child and youth gender identity service and dismissed its clinical lead, psychologist Ken Zucker. The clinic had come under intense criticism. Some accused it of practising conversion therapy by trying t...

Laura often quips: "Looks don't matter, except when they do, which is nearly always". We all have a sense that people who are conventionally attractive catch more breaks then people who are plain, and this is likely more true for women than for men. But how much does this matter for trans women, who are more likely than natal women (and non-trans men) to be unemployed and in poverty. Taryn Eames,...

Few arguments in the debate over transgender healthcare carry more emotional weight than suicide. Parents hear alarming accounts of what might happen if their child does not transition. Advocates describe gender-affirming care as lifesaving. Critics argue that the evidence cannot sustain that claim, and some have labelled the entire narrative a “suicide myth.” But what, exactly, is supposed to be...

So begins one of the more provocative essays to emerge from the trans debate in recent weeks, and today we’re joined by its author, Cassie Pritchard Cassie Pritchard begins with what can sound like a striking concession: that securing the rights of trans women may not require persuading everyone that trans women are, in every meaningful sense, women. That challenges one of the central assumptions...

Ten years ago, Megan (Ms. Mbl) is a mother who's child told her at age 9 that he thought he should have been a girl. She supported her transition, and today according to our guest, her daughter "Leah" is at thriving adult enrolled at University. Today, it is unclear whether a parent in Ms. Mbl's situation would make the same decision. We are learning that the research on the ability of medical tra...

Schyler B is a conventionally attractive woman in her 30s who exudes a down-home easy going affect, and whose smile and warmth invite you to want to get to know her better. If you saw her on line selling skin care products, home appliances, or time shares for a Caribbean resort, you would be more likely to stop and take a listen, and hear what she has to say. If she moved to your neighborhood, you...

Yvette and Laura are back after a 3 week summer hiatus with a new episode featuring bioethicist Dr. Mori Gorin and philosopher Dr. Alex Byrne to discuss their latest paper "Trans Kids - Making Up Children", where they propose a theory about how the transgender child comes to be, and if this provides any insight on how we should be thinking about the rapid rise in trans identification and medicaliz...

In this episode, we are joined by Autumn Rian Gilmore, better known as the Queen of Nuance (@autumnrain80) on Twitter/X Autumn medically and socially transitioned in her late teens to live as a woman, even going to far as to have an orchiectomy, before deciding to return to living to the male role where she spent the next twenty years Five years ago, in her early 40s, she decided to retransition a...

Sage Jasper Love spent 5 years of her life in her 20s living as a trans man. She was on testosterone, underwent a bilateral mastectomy, and found a trans partner. Then a few years ago, she decided to return to living in the female role. But distinctly from other commonly heard narratives, Sage has no regrets about her medical transition, and sees it as an important part of her identify development...

Dr Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, where her research has focused on developmental genetics and human genetic disease. She earned her PhD at the University of Warwick, studying early events in vertebrate embryonic development. Hilton became a prominent public voice in debates over sex and gender after writing about the biological basis of sex differences i...

in this episode, we speak with developmental psychologist J. D. Haltigan about his controversial argument that transsexuality should be examined through the lens of psychopathology rather than treated solely as an identity altigan’s academic work has focused on developmental psychopathology, personality, identity formation and the ways psychological symptoms can be shaped by social environments. M...

In this episode of Agree to Disagree About Gender , I speak with epidemiologist Dr. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, also known as Health Nerd, about pediatric gender medicine, medical transition for young people with gender dysphoria, and what the evidence can and cannot tell us. The quality of evidence around pediatric medical transition remains highly contested. Some argue that the existing research is...

Maia Poet joins us for Part 2 of our conversation about her theories of the interface between autism in natal females, the drive to transition and detransition, and how it informs her advocacy. We also discuss the evolution of her thinking on trans people, and her transition from a more adversarial to a more curious and collaborative approach Also, please check out Part 1 of our interview on our c...

Maia Poet spent 12 years of her adolescence and early adulthood believing she had a male brain in a female body, and eventually went on to live in the male social role amongst Orthodox Jews, Palestinian Muslims and secular Israelis for five years. It took living through two wars in the Middle East for Maia to begin the journey of questioning the conclusion she came to as a 12 year old, and eventua...

Karleigh Webb is a woman who wears a lot of hats on the field and off. She is a sports journalist with 33 years experience as a television sports reporter/anchor, producer and now as a contributing sportswriter to Outsports.com . She is also the a training coordinator and peer support operator for Trans Lifeline. Karleigh is also an avid cycling, runner, triathlete/duathlete and is in her fourth s...

Sasha Ayad is a license therapist who provides counselling to families where a child is transitioning or is experiencing gender distress. Her focus is on how parents can continue to be part of their child's life and avoid estrangement and promote reconcilement, even when they are not supportive of medical transition She joins Yvette and Laura on Agree to Disagree About Gender to have a heartfelt d...

In Part 2 of our conversation with Jonni Skinner, we focus on life after detransition: the challenges of re-integrating back into the male gender role after living for 8 years as a woman, staying positive despite facing hardships, his motivations to become an advocate for restricting access to medical interventions for minors, and on what his future might hold. Please take a moment to watch Part 1...

Jonni Skinner is a young man who spent 8 years of his adolescence and young adulthood living as a girl and young woman, before deciding to reclaim his identity as an effeminate gay man. He details how he came to believe that transition would be a better fit for his personality, his struggles with medicalization as a young person, and how he intends to face his future in his birth sex. Yvette and L...

Jamie Paul is a writer based in Greater Philadelphia, founder of American Dreaming, managing editor at Queer Majority, and contributing editor at Bi.org . His work has appeared in outlets including Quillette, Persuasion, Areo Magazine, and Gazeta do Povo. His recent focus has been on documenting what he perceives as the excesses of "wokism", and on how these excesses have undermined the status and...

Dr. Kinnon MacKinnon is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at York University in Toronto, and is one of the world's leading researchers on the phenomenon of decisional regret around gender transition, desistance from trans identification and detransition from medicalization . Dr MacKinnon''s research seeks to better characterize and understand the different factors that lead to regret and detra...