Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
Katy Faust has spent years asking a question that sits at the heart of the Cass Review: when adult desires and children's welfare diverge, which does public policy serve? The founder of Them Before Us argues that marriage law, surrogacy, and donor conception all carry hidden costs for children when adult fulfilment takes priority. For British listeners grappling with what went wrong at Tavistock, her framework offers a principled way to understand the same failure playing out across very different settings.
Katy Faust is not a name that typically appears in discussions about gender medicine, but the question she has spent her career asking sits uncomfortably close to the one that defined the Cass Review: when adult desires and children's interests diverge, which side does public policy serve? Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, an international children's rights organisation, and her thinking was shaped by personal experience. Her parents divorced when she was ten, and her mother went on to partner with a woman. She describes the arrangement as one that worked well for her, and she has maintained close relationships with both her mother and her father. Yet precisely because her own experience was relatively good, she became curious about why so many children in similar situations found it harder — and what structural factors made the difference. In this episode she makes the case that marriage law and parenting law cannot be treated as separate questions. When society redefines what marriage is, it also, in practice, redefines what a parent is. The children of divorce, of donor conception, of surrogacy arrangements are not simply the beneficiaries of adult choices; they are, she argues, the parties who bear the costs when those choices prioritise grown-up fulfilment over the child's need for both biological parents. Her work draws on testimony from donor-conceived adults and adopted children who describe an enduring sense of loss that the adults making decisions on their behalf did not always anticipate. For British listeners, this argument lands in a specific landscape. The UK's surrogacy framework has been the subject of significant reform debate, and questions about donor conception — particularly around anonymity, identity disclosure, and the rights of donor-conceived people to know their origins — have intensified over the past decade. These are not abstract legal technicalities. They are arguments about whose interests the law is ultimately organised around. The resonance with the gender medicine debate is not incidental. The Cass Review concluded, after years of evidence-gathering, that services at the Tavistock and its successors had become organised around expressed preferences rather than around long-term developmental evidence. Children were offered certainty about their identities and about the benefits of medical intervention when neither certainty was warranted. The structural problem Faust identifies — adult fulfilment elevated above children's welfare — describes exactly what Hilary Cass documented in a clinical setting. This episode will be most useful for those who want to think about children's rights as a coherent framework rather than as an argument deployed selectively in one debate or another. Faust offers a principled account of why children are not simply small adults whose preferences should be deferred to, nor instruments for adult happiness, but people with their own developmental needs and their own futures — futures that law and policy have an obligation, not merely an inclination, to protect.
