Róisín Michaux
Investigative journalist and Brussels correspondent
Róisín Michaux is an Irish investigative journalist based in Brussels whose undercover reporting has laid bare the hidden routes through which European minors — including autistic teenagers — access cross-border hormone prescriptions and surgical referrals. Her findings carry an immediate warning for Irish families and policymakers navigating a gender medicine system whose reach extends well beyond Dublin.
Róisín Michaux is an Irish investigative journalist based in Brussels, where she covers European affairs with a particular focus on health policy and the practical realities facing families who seek gender-related treatments across national borders. Her reporting examines what happens when young people move between jurisdictions whose clinical standards, safeguarding frameworks and oversight mechanisms differ sharply — and how easily those differences can be exploited.
In the Beyond Gender episode Inside Europe's Transgender Medicine System with Róisín Michaux (August 2026), she joined host Stella O'Malley to detail the findings of an undercover investigation in which she posed as a distressed autistic teenager. Navigating clinics and referral networks across Dublin, Antwerp and Madrid, Michaux documented how readily a minor presenting with gender distress — and a profile consistent with autism — could obtain cross-border hormone prescriptions and progress towards surgical referral, with minimal gatekeeping at any stage of the process.
For Irish listeners, the implications are concrete and urgent. Ireland's domestic gender medicine pathway has already come under scrutiny in the wake of the Cass Review, but Michaux's investigation exposes a wider blind spot: a motivated teenager or a well-meaning family can route around whatever caution is applied at home simply by travelling within the EU. Irish regulators have no line of sight into what happens next, and the families most likely to seek those routes are often those whose autistic children were already struggling to get answers closer to home.
Her work places the Irish situation inside a broader European picture that is rarely reported on with this level of on-the-ground detail, and it raises questions — about coordination, consent and clinical responsibility — that Irish healthcare policy has not yet been asked to answer.
