From Gay Man to Transwoman... and Back Again | Michael Kerr
25 June 2026
With Michael Kerr
UK
Michael Kerr's account of transitioning and detransitioning within NHS Scotland puts a human face on questions that formal reviews have raised about clinical standards in gender services. His experience at the Sandyford clinic — including reported dismissal of suicidal distress — directly echoes concerns raised by the Cass Review and subsequent NHS inquiries about safeguarding failures and inadequate psychosocial assessment. His organisation, Detransition Pathway UK, responds to a documented gap in NHS provision that clinical bodies across Europe are only beginning to address.
Michael Kerr is a Scottish man who transitioned in adulthood through NHS services, lived as a transwoman for several years, and subsequently detransitioned. He is the founder of Detransition Pathway UK, a peer-support organisation built specifically for people navigating the process of reversing medical and social transition. His account in this episode spans the arc from initial GP referral through to the establishment of his organisation, and at each stage it raises questions that extend well beyond the personal to the institutional and the clinical. The episode's clinical detail is particularly significant given the scrutiny NHS gender services have faced in recent years. Kerr describes his progress through the Sandyford Gender Identity Clinic in Glasgow, and a period during which he reports that expressions of suicidal distress were not adequately acted upon. This testimony sits alongside — and in some respects anticipates — concerns raised by the Cass Review, which found that NHS gender services had not met acceptable standards of evidence-based care and that psychosocial complexity was frequently underassessed. Though Cass focused primarily on under-eighteen services, many of its structural critiques apply equally to adult pathways. Kerr's return to Sandyford during and after detransition is another focal point of the conversation. He describes a culture resistant to engaging with detransition as a legitimate clinical outcome — a finding consistent with patterns that researchers have begun to document more rigorously. Detransition has long been underestimated partly because services rarely tracked patients who disengaged. More recent survey research from the United States and the United Kingdom suggests it is considerably more common than clinical records have historically reflected, and that unresolved mental health difficulties and trauma are frequently cited by those who detransition as factors insufficiently explored before transition began. The founding of Detransition Pathway UK speaks directly to a documented gap in NHS provision. No formal detransition pathway exists within the NHS, and clinical guidance covering this population remains sparse. People who detransition may require management of the ongoing effects of cross-sex hormones, psychological support, and in some cases medico-legal advice — yet no integrated service is designed to provide this. The peer-led organisation Kerr has created responds to the same absence that has led medical bodies in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the United Kingdom to call for more cautious, evidence-based approaches to gender-related treatment. Kerr was scheduled to speak at the CAN-SG conference Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine in London in July 2026, bringing together clinicians, researchers and affected individuals to examine where evidence-based practice has broken down and what reform should look like. His testimony belongs in that conversation not as anecdote alone but as a data point in a pattern that is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. The question his episode raises — what obligations do NHS services bear toward the people they have treated, both during and after transition — is precisely the question that national reviews, parliamentary inquiries and professional bodies across Europe are now being pressed to answer.
