Susan Bradley
Child psychiatrist and gender clinic pioneer
Susan Bradley co-founded Canada's first paediatric gender clinic in 1975 and spent close to five decades treating children with gender dysphoria. Her willingness to speak plainly about what the clinical evidence actually showed — and what was suppressed — carries particular weight for Ireland, where children's gender services are still being built.
Susan Bradley is a child psychiatrist who, in 1975, co-founded the gender identity clinic at what is now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto — the first paediatric gender clinic in Canada. Over the following decades she worked with hundreds of gender-dysphoric children and adolescents, building a depth of clinical experience that very few practitioners anywhere in the world can claim. Professor Emerita of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, she is also co-author, with Dr Kenneth Zucker, of the foundational text Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents.
Bradley's career spans the full arc of a field that changed almost beyond recognition. The longitudinal data from her own clinic showed consistently that the majority of gender-dysphoric children, when not rushed toward transition, went on to be comfortable in their birth sex — often as gay or lesbian adults. She has been candid that the field took a catastrophically wrong turn when it discarded that evidence base in favour of early affirmation and medical intervention, and that clinicians who raised questions faced professional consequences for doing so.
For Ireland, her testimony is not merely historical. As the HSE develops its approach to gender-distressed young people — in the wake of the Cass Report and amid heated debate among parents, schools, and policymakers — the voice of a clinician who built this specialism from scratch and watched it go wrong deserves serious attention. Stella O'Malley, as an Irish psychotherapist working with families in the middle of these questions, has noted how rare it is to find someone with Bradley's combination of long-run evidence and plain speaking.
Bradley joined Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman for the Beyond Gender episode The Truth Gender Clinicians Tried to Ignore — Dr Susan Bradley (#43, October 2025). She spoke about what her clinic's data actually showed, why she believes inconvenient findings were deliberately set aside, and what she would want clinicians building Ireland's emerging services to understand before they repeat the same mistakes.
