The Beyond Gender podcast
Long conversations about a short decade
Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman talk to the clinicians, researchers, parents and detransitioners who watched gender identity become the organising idea of a culture. Every episode is catalogued here, with a written summary, the guest and the theme.
The latest episode
27 October 2026
The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
With Harrison Koehli
Dr Bret Alderman sits down with Harrison Koehli, editor of the second edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, to ask why ordinary, well-meaning people end up enforcing destructive ideologies. The conversation traces Łobaczewski's concept of pathocracy, societies effectively steered by psychopathic and otherwise disordered personalities, and applies it to today's gender-identity movement. Koehli and Alderman discuss how such systems attract believers, why psychopathy thrives once ordinary social rules erode, and how queer theory's ego-syntonic framing echoes older patterns of ideological capture. It's a dense, historically grounded hour for anyone trying to understand how a therapeutic trend hardened into unquestionable dogma.
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All episodes
The hosts
A psychotherapist, a researcher and a psychologist. Three ways of asking the same question.
Stella O'Malley
Host, psychotherapist and founder of Genspect
Stella O'Malley is the voice that opens every episode of Beyond Gender. An Irish psychotherapist and author, she started the podcast to keep asking, in public, the questions she had been asking in her consulting room for years.
Mia Hughes
Co-host and researcher
Mia Hughes is the researcher on the Beyond Gender panel. She reads the documents everyone else cites second-hand, and her questions to guests tend to begin with a page number.
Dr Bret Alderman
Co-host and psychologist
Bret Alderman is the psychologist on the Beyond Gender panel. Where others look at policy, he looks at the mind: what a belief does to the person who holds it, and what it does to a profession that stops examining its own.
What the podcast is about
Beyond Gender began in February 2025 with a simple premise: that the rapid rise of gender identity as a medical, legal and educational category is a cultural event, and that cultural events can be examined. The hosts are gender-critical. They think sex is real, that children cannot consent to lifelong medical pathways, and that therapy which cannot ask why has stopped being therapy. Their guests are free to disagree, and some do.
More about the podcastThe wider network
This is the hub. The ideas behind the conversations are followed on beyond-gender.org. Irish, British and European listeners have their own sites for the episodes and the evidence that matter where they live. The podcast is published by Genspect, the organisation Stella O'Malley founded in 2021, and every site links back to the same YouTube channel.