From Gay Man to Transwoman... and Back Again | Michael Kerr
Michael Kerr, a Scotsman who transitioned and later detransitioned, speaks with unflinching honesty about the NHS failures that shaped both experiences. As founder of Detransition Pathway UK, he identifies a gap the health service has yet to address: structured support for those who change course. His account — stretching from a GP referral through the Sandyford clinic and back — arrives at a moment when the NHS is rebuilding its entire approach to gender medicine in the wake of the Cass Review.
Michael Kerr grew up in Scotland and, by his own account, a history of unresolved trauma became the lens through which gender dysphoria was understood — by him and, crucially, by the clinicians he encountered. His journey into the NHS gender pathway began with a GP referral that moved him toward transition, a process he describes as poorly scrutinised from the start. The questions that a thorough psychotherapeutic assessment might have surfaced — about identity, about trauma, about the roots of his distress — were not, he says, asked with any rigour. What followed was a catalogue of institutional failures. Expressions of suicidal distress, which might have prompted urgent psychological intervention, were instead passed over. Appointments at the Sandyford clinic in Scotland — the country's principal NHS gender service — proceeded without, in his account, the depth of clinical care the situation warranted. The oestrogen he was prescribed brought significant physical changes that compounded the difficulties he was already navigating, yet the system he had placed his trust in offered little in the way of ongoing monitoring or honest conversation. When doubts about his transition began to surface, Michael found himself in unfamiliar territory. Detransitioning carries its own physical and psychological complexity, but the NHS had no clear pathway for it. Returning to Sandyford, he encountered what he describes as a particular cultural climate within gender services — one that resisted questioning and left him, once again, without adequate support. His experience reflects a pattern that clinicians reviewing NHS gender services have increasingly had to confront: the needs of those who change course were simply not planned for. The response Michael has built is Detransition Pathway UK, a peer-to-peer support organisation offering practical and emotional help to others going through the same process. The model matters in a British context because statutory services have not caught up. Following the Cass Review and the closure of the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service, attention has rightly focused on how to reform gender services for young people. But the population of those who have already transitioned and are now questioning that path requires its own infrastructure — and Detransition Pathway UK represents a rare attempt to build it. Michael is due to speak at the CAN-SG conference in London — Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine — a gathering that places his lived testimony alongside clinical and research perspectives. His story is not an outlier. It is a window into what happens when affirmation becomes settled policy and scrutiny becomes an afterthought. For British listeners watching the NHS attempt a course correction, his account of what the old approach cost him, and what it failed to offer when he needed something different, is both necessary and overdue.
