Katy Faust
Children's rights advocate and author
Few guests arrive at the Beyond Gender table with both lived experience and research credentials on the same question. As founder of Them Before Us, Katy Faust has spent years making the case that children's needs must come before adult desires in debates about family structure — and her conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman is one of the podcast's most quietly urgent episodes.
Katy Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to centring children's rights in debates about family structure, reproductive technology, and parenthood. Her perspective is shaped not only by years of research and advocacy but by personal experience: raised in part by her mother and her mother's same-sex partner, she came to her work through the lived reality of what family structure means for the children at its centre.
Through Them Before Us, Faust has built an international platform amplifying the voices of children and adults who have experienced the consequences of decisions made in the name of adult desire — from donor conception to divorce to surrogacy. She is the co-author, with Stacy Manning, of Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement, a book that insists on placing children's welfare at the heart of contentious family policy debates rather than treating it as a footnote. Her work has taken her before legislative bodies and media platforms across the English-speaking world.
In the Beyond Gender episode Children First or Adults First? (January 2026), Faust joins hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to explore the overlooked connections between how societies define family structure and the downstream consequences for children. The conversation moves between the personal and the political, drawing on her lived experience and her research to examine the persistent gap between what adults want and what children need — and why closing that gap requires naming it honestly.
What makes Faust a distinctive presence in the Beyond Gender conversation is her refusal to flatten the argument in either direction. She does not dismiss the experiences of adults, but insists that children's interests be weighed with the same seriousness — a position that proves quietly radical in a cultural moment that tends to treat adult autonomy as the end of the discussion.
