Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
Katy Faust brings a rare combination to the Beyond Gender conversation: lived experience, years of research, and hard-won institutional credibility on children's rights. As founder of Them Before Us, she has spent years arguing that children's needs must come first in debates about family structure. In this episode, she and the hosts explore the overlooked connection between how societies define marriage and how they treat children — a conversation that cuts to the heart of what it means to put children before adults.
Katy Faust is not who you might expect to be making a rigorous case for children's rights within traditional family structures. Her own childhood was shaped by her parents' divorce and her mother's subsequent relationship with a woman — an arrangement she describes as having worked well for her personally. Yet rather than drawing simple conclusions from her experience, she found herself drawn to a harder question: what does the evidence actually say about what children need, and how well do our laws serve those needs? That question eventually led her to found Them Before Us in 2018, a children's rights organisation that has since taken its case to the United Nations, foreign parliaments, and the US Supreme Court. Faust has written three books on the subject, including Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement. She is someone who has done the institutional and legal work, not just the moral argument — which makes her a distinctive voice in a debate that too often stays at the level of sentiment. The conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman returns again and again to a straightforward claim: when adult desires become the organising principle of family law, children end up bearing the cost. Faust draws a clear line between marriage law and parenthood law, arguing that how a society defines marriage shapes how it defines a parent — and what obligations adults are understood to owe the children they bring into the world. She applies this framework to several contexts she has studied closely: divorce, donor conception, and surrogacy. In each case, she argues, the legal and cultural arrangements that have developed tend to prioritise adult fulfilment over children's need for connection to both a mother and a father. The children who grow up in these arrangements often carry a sense of loss that polite society has been too quick to explain away or simply ignore. For a podcast rooted in concern about the medicalisation of gender-distressed children, the territory Faust maps is adjacent and illuminating. The same pattern she identifies — adult wants framed as children's interests, institutions slow to examine the evidence — runs through many of the debates that Beyond Gender has been exploring since it launched. Faust does not address gender medicine directly, but the framework she offers listeners will find immediately applicable to those conversations. What makes this episode worth your time is Faust's combination of personal honesty, intellectual rigour and hard-won institutional credibility. She is not arguing from ideology but from years of engagement with evidence and with the stories of people who grew up shaped by decisions made for adult convenience. The episode's title poses a deceptively simple question; Faust makes clear that the answer carries consequences that last a lifetime.
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