Susan Bradley
Child psychiatrist and gender clinic co-founder
Susan Bradley co-founded Canada's first paediatric gender clinic in 1975 and spent nearly fifty years treating gender-dysphoric children. Her clinical record — and her willingness to say what the evidence showed — speaks directly to the questions Britain is still working through after the Cass Review and the closure of Tavistock's GIDS.
Susan Bradley is a Canadian child psychiatrist who, in 1975, co-founded the gender identity clinic at what is now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto — one of the first such services for children anywhere in the world. Over nearly fifty years of clinical practice she built a longitudinal record of outcomes that few practitioners anywhere could match.
That record, she told the Beyond Gender hosts in The Truth Gender Clinicians Tried to Ignore (episode 43), tells a consistent story: most children who experienced gender dysphoria but were not placed on a medical pathway grew up to be gay or lesbian. It is precisely the finding the Cass Review independently reached for the UK — and one that informed Hilary Cass's conclusion that the evidence base for paediatric medical transition was far weaker than proponents had claimed. Bradley is equally direct about puberty blockers: she argues they are not reversible, and that in practice they function as a pipeline to cross-sex hormones rather than a neutral pause — an assessment that aligns with the NHS's own decision to halt routine prescribing for under-18s.
Her testimony carries particular weight for British listeners because the institutional dynamics she describes — clinicians who raised concerns facing professional pressure to stay silent — mirror what the Cass Review documented on this side of the Atlantic. The closure of the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service and the restrictions that followed were, in part, an acknowledgement that dissenting voices had been suppressed for too long.
Bradley is the co-author, with Kenneth Zucker, of Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents (1995), a foundational clinical text that has become a touchstone for those questioning the affirmation-only model. Her appearance on Beyond Gender places nearly half a century of direct clinical observation alongside the policy questions Britain is still working through.
