From Gay Man to Transwoman... and Back Again | Michael Kerr
25 June 2026
With Michael Kerr
UK
Michael Kerr, a detransitioned gay man from Scotland, recounts how unresolved trauma drove him toward transition, how the NHS consistently failed him throughout that process, and how he found almost no institutional support when he chose to detransition. His experience illuminates a systemic gap that Ireland shares: the HSE provides no formal detransition pathway, and men and women reversing a medical transition are largely left to navigate the consequences alone.
Michael Kerr is a detransitioned man from Scotland who was, in his own framing, a gay man who transitioned and later came back. He is now the founder of Detransition Pathway UK, a peer-to-peer organisation built specifically to fill the support vacuum that statutory health services have so far refused to address. His appearance on Beyond Gender is one of the most direct accounts yet broadcast of what happens when the clinical system that encouraged a transition declines to take any responsibility for what comes after. The episode traces Kerr's story from a GP referral onward, with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman drawing out the detail at each stage. Kerr describes earlier trauma that, in retrospect, was the unexamined engine behind his gender distress — distress that was treated as a clear-cut identity question rather than as something requiring psychological exploration. The referral pathway moved faster than his understanding of his own situation, a pattern that clinical reviews in several countries have since identified as a structural problem rather than an individual oversight. His account of NHS conduct during the transition period includes a claim that suicide threats were not followed up as safeguarding concerns — a serious allegation pointing to institutional dysfunction rather than isolated error. He also returns to Sandyford, the Glasgow sexual health and gender service, describing an institutional culture that, in his experience, was not equipped to hear ambivalence or doubt. For Irish listeners, Sandyford is a name worth noting: it is frequently cited in Scottish gender medicine debates in terms that closely mirror conversations about the HSE's National Gender Service here. The section on detransition itself is the episode's most significant contribution. Kerr describes not only the physical effects of having taken oestrogen but the near-total absence of any clinical support once he made clear he wanted to reverse course. No structured programme existed. No clinician took ownership. What support he found came from peers who had been through the same experience. This gap is not unique to Scotland or England. The HSE has no published detransition protocol, and Irish people who have gone through gender-related medical intervention and later sought to reverse it have similarly reported being directed back to services that were designed to affirm, not to support a return. Kerr's founding of Detransition Pathway UK is a direct response to that absence. The organisation offers peer support, practical guidance and a point of contact for people at any stage of detransition. It exists because no statutory body created anything comparable. That same logic applies in Ireland, where the question of what happens to patients who later regret gender-related medical treatment has not been formally answered by the HSE, by HIQA, or in any published review of the National Gender Service's outcomes. The episode is also a case study in how a man's homosexuality interacted with the transition pathway. Kerr is candid that he was a gay man, and that this dimension of his identity was not adequately explored during assessment. The broader evidence base — including the Cass Review published in England in 2024 — has raised persistent questions about the proportion of young people with same-sex attraction who present at gender clinics. Kerr's story gives that statistical observation a human shape.
