Louise Irvine
GP and Co-Chair, Clinical Advisory Network
Few clinicians have been as willing to name what went wrong in British gender medicine — and to stay in the room long enough to map a path forward. Louise Irvine brings the perspective of a GP who has watched institutions drift from evidence-based care, and in her Beyond Gender conversation she doesn't let the hard questions stay rhetorical.
Louise Irvine is a British GP and Co-Chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG), an organisation that has brought together clinicians to scrutinise the evidence base for gender-related healthcare and to support practitioners navigating a field where guidance shifted rapidly — and often ahead of the evidence. Her work spans frontline general practice and sustained engagement with the institutional debates that have reshaped how the NHS approaches gender medicine in young people.
CAN-SG has positioned itself as a resource for clinicians working in an area of acute professional uncertainty, and Irvine's co-chair role places her at the intersection of clinical practice, institutional accountability, and the wider public conversation about standards of care. It is a vantage point that gives her contributions unusual breadth: she can speak as a GP, as someone inside the policy process, and as a clinician who has read the evidence carefully and is prepared to say what it does and does not show.
In Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine, recorded in June 2026, she joins Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman for a searching examination of how British healthcare institutions lost their clinical footing in this area. The conversation works through the WellBN investigation as a case study in how institutional drift can take hold, and examines the evidence on puberty blockers — asking why so many medical bodies applied less scrutiny to these interventions than they would to almost anything else.
The episode's particular value lies in Irvine's willingness to be specific rather than gestural. She traces the mechanics of how institutions go wrong and what bringing them back to clinical ground would actually require. For anyone serious about understanding the British gender medicine story beyond headlines, this conversation is an essential hour.
