Quentin Van Meter
Paediatric endocrinologist and gender medicine insider
A paediatric endocrinologist who trained at Johns Hopkins during the John Money era and treated gender-distressed children before clinical guidelines existed, Quentin Van Meter brings four decades of frontline experience to the Beyond Gender conversation—offering a rare insider account of how gender medicine was made and where it went.
Few clinicians can trace their involvement in gender medicine as far back as Quentin Van Meter. A paediatric endocrinologist who completed his training at Johns Hopkins University during the height of John Money's influence, Van Meter was present at the institutional origins of a practice that would eventually reshape how medicine responds to gender distress in children and adolescents. He did not inherit a set of clinical protocols—he practised before any existed.
In the Beyond Gender episode From John Money to Modern Gender Clinics: An Insider Speaks (episode 28, August 2025), Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr. Bret Alderman spend close to an hour drawing out what four decades of paediatric endocrinology looks like from the inside. Van Meter reflects on Money's legacy, the early clinical decisions made without an evidence base, and how the field transformed across his career—culminating in a WPATH he describes as something markedly different from the institution that once set the standard for care.
Van Meter has served as president of the American College of Pediatricians and has become one of the most prominent clinical voices raising concerns about the medicalisation of gender-distressed youth. He has testified before legislative bodies and spoken at medical conferences arguing that the evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors is far weaker than advocates claim—a position he frames not as a cultural intervention but as a straightforward reading of the science.
What the Beyond Gender conversation surfaces is the particular weight that comes from speaking from the inside. Van Meter is not a critic who arrived late; he is a witness who was there. The episode is an extended inquiry into what it means to have watched a field move—and to have decided, at some point, to push back.
