YOUTH GENDER DISTRESS

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Alex’s most recent book is Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions (Polity, 2024). Byrne was one of the contributors to the Health and Human Services (HHS) report "Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices" released in May 2025.

Systemic & family psychotherapist, psychologist and supervisor/trainer. Anastassis works in London and Athens with adolescents, adults, couples, and families across the lifespan, and specializes in embodied distress, eating disorders, relational difficulties, and gender-related distress, alongside generic mental health. He is a visiting lecturer in King’s College London and recently contributed to the training of clinicians in the new youth gender services in the UK. He previously worked in the NHS, where he openly raised his concerns about the overmedicalization of gender-related distress in adolescence. Anastassis is currently completing his Doctorate on embodiment of females with historical gender difficulties.

Research psychologist and psychoanalyst in training. He is currently completing his PhD at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Medical University of Innsbruck. His research explores psychodynamic and developmental perspectives on adolescence and psychopathology, with a particular focus on gender dysphoria. He practices psychodynamic psychotherapy with adolescents and adults in private practice.

Clinical psychologist with 25 years of frontline experience, specialising in adolescent mental health and physical health. She serves as the Clinical Director at the Integrated Psychology Clinic in London. From 2013 to 2017, Anna worked at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at The Tavistock Clinic. Since leaving GIDS, Anna has been working to raise awareness of the complex needs faced by young people experiencing gender-related distress. She continues to educate and write on the subject, having recently co-led the induction training for the new NHS Children and Young People Gender Hubs in collaboration with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges in the UK. She is currently co-authoring a book on developmentally-informed therapy for gender-related distress in children.

Consultant psychiatrist and medical psychotherapist in full-time private practice based at Harley Street in London. He was formerly Consultant in Forensic Psychotherapy at the Portman clinic where he single-handedly set up and ran a Specialist Adult Gender Identity Psychotherapy service for 12 years from 2000. He is the author of two books, Trans and Detrans, and devised the GPSQ and GPSQ2 Outcome Measures for use in gender dysphoria in adults and children/adolescents.

Former President of USPATH and past board member of WPATH, Anderson served as a clinical psychologist at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at the University of California–San Francisco. Dr. Anderson was one of the first gender clinicians to publicly speak out about inadequate evaluation of gender-dysphoric adolescents and young adults in the US.

Chair and clinical director of the Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy at Jena University Hospital, one of the six competitively selected locations of the German Centre for Mental Health. He has an extensive track record in clinical research, and is the recipient of prestigious awards like the Young Minds in Psychiatry Award (APA) or the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship Award (IACAPAP). From mid 2020 to late 2022, he was a member of the guideline group for the new German-language S2k Guidelines on Gender Dysphoria in minors, and left this group upon his own wish because of his clinical concerns.

Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who has been practicing for more than 40 years. He works primarily with trans-identified boys and young men who have detransitioned. He also supervises, teaches, and writes books.

Contributing editor at UnHerd and a co-director of The Lesbian Project. She is the author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (Little Brown 2021). She has written for a range of national newspapers, and is a sometime columnist for the Sunday Times and the Times. Until 2021, she was a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University. She was awarded an OBE for services to higher education in 2020.

Editor-in-Chief of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a peer-reviewed journal that has led the way in platforming debate in the field of youth gender medicine. Dr. Zucker served as the chair of the DSM-5 Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders. A clinical psychologist with 40+ years of experience working with gender-dysphoric youth, Dr. Zucker formerly led the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and a consultant psychotherapist and mental health nurse with 45 years of experience. He was head of the nursing discipline at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust 1998-2018. He was also the lead clinician in the adult and adolescent service and one of the founding members of Fitzjohn’s Service for the treatment of patients with severe and enduring mental health conditions and/or personality disorders. He has taught and written extensively on applying psychoanalytic thinking in mental health settings, including Making Room for Madness in Mental Health, Psychoanalytic Thinking in Mental Health Settings, and Gender Dysphoria: a Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults, co-authored with his wife, Susan, and the forthcoming Identity and the Foundational Myth: Psychoanalytic Insights into Gender Dysphoria.

Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross.He was the first to discover the experiment with puberty blockers conducted by the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service and the first to publish its unfavourable results. His research on puberty blockers and on suicide by adolescents who identify as transgender has been published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Journal of Sexual Medicine, and in two edited volumes: Inventing Transgender Children and Young People and Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader.

Moti Gorin, PhD, MBE is a philosopher and bioethicist. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University.

Executive director of Therapy First. Paul holds a Masters of Social Work from Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work and completed graduate training in LGBT behavioral health at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. Paul was profiled in Pamela Paul’s New York Times article Gender Dysphoric Kids Deserve Better Care, published in February 2024, and subsequently authored an op-ed published by the Washington Post addressing the challenges experienced by clinicians working with youth gender dysphoria. He works in private practice in New York City.

Professor of adolescent psychiatry, leader of one of the two nationally centralized gender identity units for minors in Finland, and committee member for national guidelines for health services related to medical and surgical gender reassignment. Dr. Kaltiala was the first leader of a national pediatric gender clinic to raise concerns regarding the risk-benefit ratio of treating gender-dysphoric youth with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Finland was the first country to revise the standard of care to prioritize noninvasive approaches, sharply restricting eligibility for hormonal interventions. Dr. Kaltiala is currently involved in two major international evidence review projects in the field of gender medicine.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Byron Bay, Australia. Dr. D’Angelo works with adolescents and young adults with gender dysphoria, using a contemporary psychoanalytic approach. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. His publications explore clinical and ethical issues in the treatment of gender dysphoria. Roberto D’Angelo serves as the President of SEGM.

Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and the Lead Consultant Neuropsychologist for the epilepsy surgery program at the National Hospital for Neurology, Queen Square. She has over 200 academic publications in neuropsychology, including books, book chapters and original research studies and was awarded the International Neuropsychological Society Arthur Benton Prize in 2018 in recognition of her outstanding scientific contributions to the field of neuropsychology and received the Distinguished Contribution Award from the British Psychological Society in 2023. She is a passionate advocate for the application of neuropsychological principles and knowledge in public policy and discourse. Her research and clinical interests focus on understanding the multifactorial nature of cognitive impairments in clinical populations. Her review of the impact of puberty blockers on neurodevelopment featured in the Cass Review.

Researcher exploring the online communities where young people adopt new attitudes and beliefs about gender and set expectations and intentions for transition. Her M.Sc. thesis, "Questions and doubts in online trans communities," is available through McGill University. She is currently writing a book about gender medicine for Polity.

Psychiatrist who started one of the first gender clinics for gender patients in 1974 and has continuously been active seeing patients and writing about his and his colleagues’ observations since. Most of his recent experience has been with transgender youth. Six of his recent co-authored or sole authored papers have been downloaded over 325,000 times. Long interested in psychotherapy as an investigative and therapeutic tool, he posits the hypothesis that a new trans identity is a creative unconscious solution to existential woes that must be understood in terms of the youthful sensibilities of the minor.

Registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She trained as a nurse and has worked with the NHS for 40 years. She was also a senior fellow at University of East London and a clinical lecturer for Middlesex University. From 2003 to 2007, Susan worked in the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock, where she raised concerns about inadequate assessment of young patients. In 2019, Susan applied to the High Court in the UK for a Judicial Review of GIDS’ treatment of children (Keira Bell v. Tavistock). Issues exposed during the Judicial Review contributed to the decision to appoint Dr. Hilary Cass to conduct an independent clinical review. Susan co-authored Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model with her husband, Marcus.

Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the University of Heidelberg and Medical Director of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim (since 2006), and Deputy Director of the CIMH (since, 2014). He studied psychology and medicine at Marburg University. His main research areas are developmental trajectories of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders with associated risks and protective factors, their underlying etiological and neurobiological mechanisms, development of individualized treatment strategies, and evidence-based clinical guidelines.

Healthcare researcher and author of several widely-read peer-reviewed publications in pediatric gender medicine. After observing an influx of teens presenting with gender dysphoria for the first time in adolescence in 2018, Zhenya began to study the Dutch protocol and its applicability to the current clinical dilemmas. Eventually her work led her to co-found the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Previously, Zhenya worked for a major US-based health insurer identifying low-value healthcare interventions, and led a venture-backed startup focused on patients suffering with medically-unexplained symptoms.