Róisín Michaux
Investigative journalist covering gender medicine
Róisín Michaux brought rare on-the-ground reporting to Beyond Gender — the kind that required going undercover. An Irish investigative journalist based in Brussels, she mapped the real routes through which European minors access hormones and surgery outside conventional oversight, and what she uncovered made for one of the podcast's most startling conversations.
Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman don't often get a guest who has literally gone undercover to report the story they're discussing — but that is exactly what Róisín Michaux brought to Inside Europe's Transgender Medicine System, broadcast in August 2026. An Irish investigative journalist based in Brussels, Michaux operates at close range to the European institutions and cross-border networks that shape healthcare access across the continent, and she applied that proximity to one of the least scrutinised corners of contemporary medicine.
For her investigation, Michaux posed as a fictitious distressed autistic teenager to test, first-hand, how accessible hormones and surgical referrals really are for Irish and European minors. What she found was a functioning infrastructure of online prescribers, cross-border clinics, and informal networks operating well outside the oversight structures most people assume are in place. Her account on the podcast put concrete, reported evidence behind questions that are too often treated as purely theoretical.
The conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts moved through the specific mechanics she uncovered — who these services are, how they reach young people, and what meaningful gatekeeping, if any, remains — as well as the broader question of how European health systems have allowed such a landscape to develop largely unexamined. Michaux's Brussels base gives her unusual purchase on the EU-level dimension of a debate that is usually reported country by country, in isolation.
Inside Europe's Transgender Medicine System is essential listening for anyone who wants the investigative layer of this conversation: not argument and analysis alone, but reported fact about what is actually available to vulnerable minors, and how easily it can be reached.
