Beyond Gender, from Ireland

The gender debate, heard from County Offaly

Beyond Gender is recorded in Ireland by an Irish psychotherapist, and Ireland keeps coming up: the HSE, the National Gender Service, the schools, the Oireachtas. This site gathers the episodes and guests that matter most to Irish listeners.

Irish landscape with green hills and stone walls under soft morning light

The latest episode

15 September 2026

REPATH LAUNCH

Genspect's REPATH campaign officially launches, calling for the restoration of psychiatric evaluation and differential diagnosis for those experiencing gender dysphoria — in place of automatic affirmation. Stella O'Malley and Mia Hughes discuss what this means in practice. For Ireland, where the HSE is still shaping its model of care for young people with gender distress, REPATH arrives as a timely and significant challenge to the affirmation-first approach that has dominated clinical settings.

What this episode means for Ireland

The hosts

An Irish psychotherapist, an English researcher in Canada and an American psychologist. Ireland is where the podcast is made.

Stella O'Malley, an Irish voice

Stella O'Malley, an Irish voice

Psychotherapist in County Offaly and host of Beyond Gender

Stella O'Malley practises as a psychotherapist in the Irish midlands and has been, for most of a decade, the best-known Irish clinician willing to question the affirmative approach to gender in public.

Mia Hughes

Mia Hughes

Co-host and researcher

Mia Hughes is the Beyond Gender co-host who turns an Irish anecdote into a question about documents: what the HSE guideline says, what the clinic's own audit found, what the international bodies Ireland defers to were saying in private.

Dr Bret Alderman

Dr Bret Alderman

Co-host and psychologist

Bret Alderman is the American psychologist on the panel, and for Irish listeners he is the outsider's eye: the co-host who notices what is distinctively Irish about an Irish story.

Why Ireland

Ireland passed self-identification into law in 2015 with almost no debate, and has been living with the consequences since: a gender service in dispute with its own referrers, schools without guidance, a political class that would rather not revisit the question. Beyond Gender is one of the few Irish platforms that talks about any of it for longer than a radio segment.

About this site

The facts behind the episodes

Conversations are one thing; the record is another. The sister site beyondgender.ie holds the Irish dossiers, the timeline from the Gender Recognition Act to today and the primary sources: the Acts, the HSE documents, the judgments. Use the two together.

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