Michael Kerr
Detransitioner and peer support advocate
Michael Kerr is a Scottish detransitioned man who spent years inside the NHS gender system. On the Beyond Gender podcast he sits down with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to speak with unusual candour about the trauma that drove his transition, the clinical failures he encountered, and the peer support work he has built to help others find their footing.
Michael Kerr's path through the NHS gender system — from gay man to transwoman and, eventually, back again — is the kind of story that rarely gets the space it deserves. In the episode "From Gay Man to Transwoman... and Back Again" (June 2026), he sits down with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to trace that journey in full: the unresolved trauma that he now recognises as the engine of his transition, the moments when the clinical system fell short, and the long process of finding himself on the other side.
What makes his conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts particularly striking is its candour. Kerr does not arrive with a polished narrative or a point to score; he speaks from inside the experience, including its most uncomfortable and contradictory parts. The hosts draw out the detail — how the questions he needed answered were never asked, how the system he trusted moved him forward when it should have paused — and the result is one of the more searching accounts of NHS gender care to appear on the podcast.
Since detransitioning, Kerr has channelled that experience into peer support work, building an organisation aimed at helping others navigate a path that has very little institutional infrastructure around it. That work — practical, community-based, built on lived experience rather than clinical protocol — sits at the heart of why his voice carries weight on a programme like Beyond Gender, which has always been as interested in what happens after the system as in what happens inside it.
