Jaco van Zyl
Psychotherapist and cultural commentator
Jaco van Zyl is a psychotherapist whose work examines how Western culture's retreat from shared reality is reshaping childhood and adolescence. His conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts cuts directly to one of the Cass Review's most sobering findings: that NHS gender services had drifted from exploring young people's distress to affirming their stated identities — with consequences still being reckoned with.
Jaco van Zyl is a psychotherapist whose clinical practice and public commentary centre on what he identifies as a profound cultural shift: the West's gradual abandonment of shared reality in favour of individual self-perception. In the Beyond Gender episode What Happens When a Generation Grows Up Without Reality (May 2025), he argued that this shift is not merely philosophical but clinically legible — visible in consulting rooms, in schools, and in the behaviour of institutions charged with protecting children.
For British listeners, van Zyl's analysis carries particular weight. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, found that the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service had moved progressively away from rigorous psychological exploration of young patients' distress and towards validation of their self-reported identities. Van Zyl's framing — that a culture which prizes individual feeling over external reality will produce institutions that do the same — offers a coherent lens through which to understand how that institutional drift occurred, and why it proved so difficult to name and reverse from within.
A recurring thread in the episode is so-called gentle parenting and the broader cultural reluctance to expose children to frustration, limits, and the ordinary friction of a world that does not bend to their wishes. Van Zyl argues that this reluctance, however kindly intended, leaves adolescents psychologically ill-equipped to navigate the gap between desire and reality — a gap that, when left unaddressed by the adults around them, can become a site of serious harm. In the context of the NHS, where clinical guidance is now being rewritten in the wake of Cass, these arguments bear directly on what therapeutic work with gender-distressed young people should actually involve.
Van Zyl draws on classical psychotherapeutic thinking about development, boundaries, and the necessary role of reality-testing in healthy psychological growth — a tradition he suggests was quietly marginalised during the years in which gender-affirming care became the default clinical model on both sides of the Atlantic.
