Scott Newgent
Transgender advocate against medical harm
Scott Newgent transitioned female-to-male and has lived with the surgical fallout ever since. On the podcast she tells Mia Hughes how homophobia, not gender identity, set her on that path, and why she now calls gender-affirming care a form of conversion therapy for gay people - testimony she carried to UK Parliament days later.
Scott Newgent is an American transgender-identified advocate who underwent female-to-male transition as an adult and went on to suffer severe, lasting complications from the surgeries involved. Rather than staying silent about that harm, she has spent recent years speaking publicly and to lawmakers about what she sees as a medical system too quick to operate and too slow to ask why a patient wants to transition in the first place.
In the episode "Trans Away The Gay: Gender-Affirming Care IS Conversion Therapy | Scott Newgent," she joins host Mia Hughes to walk back through her own case history: a relationship dynamic that pushed her away from accepting her attraction to women, a therapist who encouraged transition rather than exploring that conflict, and a gynecologist who labelled her intersex without ever running the tests to confirm it. Scott traces how those steps compounded into irreversible surgery and years of subsequent medical harm - a story she tells not as regret over who she is, but as an indictment of how she was routed there.
The conversation lands at a pointed moment: Scott recorded it just days before testifying to UK Parliament against a proposed ban on conversion therapy, arguing that as currently framed, such bans would entrench the very practice she says harmed her - treating young gay and same-sex-attracted people's discomfort with their sexuality as something to be resolved through gender transition instead of explored.
For Beyond Gender listeners, it's a rare first-person account connecting clinical practice directly to live legislation, delivered by someone with the medical scars and the parliamentary testimony to back it up.
