REPATH LAUNCH
15 September 2026
Global
The launch of REPATH — Genspect's Re-psychopathologisation Campaign — arrives at a defining moment for British healthcare. With the Cass Review having already pushed the NHS away from automatic affirmation and towards rigorous psychological assessment, Stella O'Malley and Mia Hughes argue that restoring a psychiatric framework for gender distress is not a retreat but the evidence-led approach that British clinicians, patients and families have long been owed.
On the day Genspect officially launches REPATH — its Re-psychopathologisation Campaign — Stella O'Malley and Mia Hughes take listeners through what the initiative is, why it exists, and what it is asking of clinicians, policymakers and institutions worldwide. REPATH argues that transgender ideation should once again be understood through a psychiatric and psychological lens — not to pathologise gender non-conformity or same-sex attraction, but to ensure that everyone presenting with gender distress receives a thorough differential diagnosis before any irreversible intervention is considered. It is a call to put proper clinical care back at the centre. For British listeners, the timing could scarcely be more resonant. The Cass Review reached strikingly similar conclusions through its own evidence-based process: that automatic affirmation had displaced careful clinical assessment, that co-occurring mental health conditions were routinely overlooked, and that the experimental nature of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones had not been honestly communicated to families. The Tavistock GIDS has closed. NHS England's successor services are operating under new, more cautious guidance. REPATH's launch enters a policy landscape already in motion, giving an international name and coalition to what Cass recommended in Britain. Re-psychopathologisation is a term that demands careful unpacking, and O'Malley and Hughes do exactly that. The campaign is explicit that it does not argue for the blanket pathologising of any identity or expression. What it calls for is the reinstatement of a clinical process: the recognition that gender dysphoria — particularly in adolescents — frequently arises alongside autism, anxiety, trauma, sexual orientation confusion and other treatable conditions, and that those conditions deserve assessment and care rather than being bypassed by a single diagnostic pathway leading directly to hormones. As a psychotherapist, O'Malley brings a practitioner's perspective to what has been lost. Clients who might once have been offered exploratory therapy, support for underlying difficulties and time to understand themselves were instead fast-tracked through a system that treated self-reported gender identity as the primary and essentially unchallengeable diagnosis. REPATH's framework would restore the space for careful, unhurried clinical work — precisely the model the Cass Review described as the standard that British gender services abandoned under ideological pressure. For families currently navigating the post-Tavistock landscape — regional hubs still finding their footing, lengthy waiting lists, and continued external pressure to restore affirmation-only approaches — REPATH offers both a vocabulary and a sense of international solidarity. It makes clear that what happened in Britain was not an isolated institutional failure but part of a global pattern now being formally named, documented and challenged. The campaign's launch marks a moment when the clinical and research communities pushing back against the affirmation model begin to coordinate their demands in a single, legible framework.
