Katy Faust
Children's rights advocate and author
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a children's rights organisation that scrutinises policies — from surrogacy to donor conception — where adult desires override children's welfare. Her argument that institutions reliably drift toward serving adult stakeholders offers British listeners a framework for understanding not just what went wrong at Tavistock, but why.
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a US-based advocacy organisation built on a single insistent question: when adult desires and children's welfare pull in opposite directions, which does public policy actually serve? Her answer, backed by research and the testimonies of donor-conceived and adoptee adults, is that the legal architecture surrounding marriage, surrogacy and donor conception was built primarily around adult fulfilment — and that the costs to children are rarely counted at the point of legislation.
She is the co-author, with Stacy Manning, of Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement, which argues that children fare best when raised by their own married biological parents and that departures from that norm impose real, if often invisible, burdens on the children those arrangements produce. Her work has made her one of the most prominent voices in the English-speaking world insisting that children cannot lobby for themselves in the policy arena — and that someone must do it for them.
In the Beyond Gender episode Children First or Adults First? (January 2026), she joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to apply that framework to gender-related healthcare for minors. The resonance for British listeners is hard to miss: the Cass Review concluded that children attending gender clinics were too often processed through a model that lacked adequate evidence and rigorous clinical assessment. Faust's analysis — that systems drift toward adult priorities unless deliberately designed otherwise — offers a coherent account of how Tavistock sustained that model for so long without meaningful correction.
Her arguments land at a live moment for Britain. Parliament continues to debate surrogacy law reform, donor-conceived people are pressing for greater transparency around their biological origins, and schools are caught between competing duties of pastoral care and parental rights. Faust's contribution is less a set of policy prescriptions than a habit of mind: look past adult intent and ask what the child actually experiences.
