Beyond Gender

Attorney Mary McAlister sits down with Stella to talk about the ongoing battle in courts to protect what parents decide for their children, especially against this wave of gender ideology slipping into schools across the U.S. McAlister shares stories from her role at the Child & Parental Rights Campaign. There, she represents families whose children have been secretly transitioned by schools without parental knowledge. The conversation traces the ideological roots of current policies back to the controversial research of Alfred Kinsey, whose work Mary studied alongside the late Dr. Judith Reisman. From secret school transitions to the weaponisation of Child Protective Services, Mary explains how Kinsey’s ideas laid the groundwork for today’s attacks on parental authority, and how the legal tide is finally beginning to turn.Mary E. McAlister is Senior Litigation Counsel for the nonprofit group, the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, launched in 2019. She’s been in the legal game for almost 30 years now - handling trials, pushing appeals, championing family choices and free speech rights, all the way up to the Supreme Court.Mary holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law and a B.S. in Journalism (summa cum laude) from California Polytechnic State University. Before her public interest work, she was a journalist and later a commercial litigator in California. She previously served as Senior Litigation Counsel at Liberty Counsel.Starting in 2010 and right up to when Dr. Judith Reisman passed away in April 2021, McAlister teamed up closely with her. Together, they penned scholarly pieces that spotlighted how Alfred Kinsey’s shadow still hangs over society. These days, McAlister runs The Reisman Institute as its president, picking up where Reisman left off, probing the roots of the sexual revolution.

Derrick Jensen is an environmental philosopher and author of over 25 books. In this conversation with Stella and Bret, he traces the intellectual lineage from anarchism through queer theory to trans, explaining how the rejection of all social norms, including those protecting children, found its way into academic theory and beyond.Jensen discusses how his book The Culture of Make Believe predicted the rise of the insane right, but when he tried to write a companion critique of the insane left, his publisher held the manuscript for five years before dropping him entirely for criticizing queer theory.He walks through the founding documents most people have never actually read, including Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" and Michel Foucault's advocacy for abolishing age of consent laws. The conversation also covers Karen Horney's concept of "womb envy," Peggy Reeves Sanday's cross-cultural research on sexual violence, and DARVO, the pattern where abusers deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. Stella and Bret also ask Jensen about his viral "Queer Theory Jeopardy" moment.

This conversation was pre-recorded and presented at Genspect's The Bigger Picture Conference, held 27–28 September 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Abigail Shrier and Stella O'Malley discuss how therapy culture has gone wrong for young people—and what parents can do about it.

Shownotes: https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/woke-eugenics-evolutionary-psychologist

https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/the-biggest-scandal-since-lobotomies

Full shownotes: https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/jamie-reed-i-thought-i-was-saving

Episode shownotes: https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/when-therapists-arent-allowed-to-e32

This is our second interview with Dr. Paul McHugh - we sincerely apologize for mistakenly re-uploading the first interview last week.

She went from revolutionary communist to member of the House of Lords. From bankrupted magazine publisher to defender of free speech in Parliament. And now she’s watching the same patterns play out again – adults surrendering to emotional blackmail, institutions betraying the people they claim to protect, and an entire generation being told that if they don’t get what they want, it will destroy them.Claire Fox, Baroness Fox of Buckley, has spent four decades fighting battles over speech, truth, and who gets to decide what’s best for other people.

Professor Eric Kaufmann reveals why the progressive era that began in the 1960s is finally collapsing. This isn't just about "woke" culture - it's about the end of a 60-year ideological system that has shaped every major institution in the West.Key topics discussed:The "moral Big Bang" of the 1960s and how white guilt transformed American institutionsWhy affirmative action (1965-2025) and disparate impact doctrine are being dismantled after 60 yearsThe crucial distinction between "cultural socialism" and economic MarxismHow universities became ground zero for ideological captureCanada as a "woke theocracy" compared to the US and UKThe emerging battle between classical liberals and post-liberals on the rightProfessor Kaufmann's departure from Birkbeck after 20 years to found the Centre for Heterodox Social ScienceKaufmann traces the origins of today's culture wars back to the civil rights era, showing how ideas that emerged at Berkeley in the 1960s have now scaled up to dominate institutions. He provides historical context from Nixon's era through to Trump's executive orders, demonstrating that current political battles are actually about reversing policies that have been entrenched for over half a century.This conversation offers essential historical perspective on why Western societies are experiencing such dramatic political and cultural upheaval, and what might replace the progressive consensus.*Note: This conversation was recorded before Professor Kaufmann's October 2025 report "The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans" showing a dramatic drop in trans identification among youth. Read the full report: https://www.heterodoxcentre.com/resea...Eric Kaufmann (https://x.com/epkaufm) Professor of Politics, University of Buckingham Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Author of extensive research on culture wars, populism, and political polarization

In 1975, Dr. Susan Bradley founded Toronto’s first gender clinic for children at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. For nearly five decades, she treated over 400 gender-dysphoric children and chaired the DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders. The pattern she observed was impossible to ignore: “Even the ones who’ve gone through some of this and come out in our clinic, they’re nearly all gay or lesbian.” Now, in her eighties, she’s speaking out about what went wrong.

🚨 15 years after WPATH's 2010 de-psychopathologization campaign, Genspect launches the counter-campaign to restore psychiatric safeguards Mia Hughes and Stella O'Malley explain why recognizing the drive for extreme body modification as pathological is the most compassionate, evidence-based response to protect vulnerable youth from the harms of WPATH's de-psychopathologization.The Critical Distinction: A teen exploring trans identity? Not pathological. A teen obsessively fixated on removing healthy body parts, pursuing lifelong medicalization, destroying their endocrine system? That's pathological behavior requiring mental health support—not celebration and scalpels. "You could develop a trans identity and not want any medical interventions. And arguably your behavior is not yet pathological. It's when you're going into actual harmful medical interventions that are going to harm your body. Now your behavior is pathological." - Stella O'MalleyWhat Happened: In 2010, WPATH's de-psychopathologization campaign declared trans identities "natural and healthy," dismantled all psychiatric guardrails, and triggered a social contagion among youth. By 2013, the DSM-5 replaced "Gender Identity Disorder" with "Gender Dysphoria"—the identity was now healthy, only the distress was pathological. By 2018, the WHO's ICD-11 went further, moving it entirely out of mental health into "conditions related to sexual health."The result? Kids started falling into an ideological abyss with no safeguards to catch them.Campaign hub: https://genspect.org/re-psychopathologization-campaign/

Episode #41

At 34 years old, Sall Grover thought she was creating a simple solution to a common problem. After years of sexual harassment as a screenwriter in Hollywood, she and her parents developed Giggle—a women-only app for roommates, freelance work, and lesbian dating. Using facial recognition technology, the app verified users were female before granting access. Apple and Google approved every build throughout 2019 without question. Then came February 7th, 2020, and Sall’s life became a legal nightmare that would span five years and counting.

At 13 years old, Jonni Skinner was diagnosed with a fake endocrine disorder and put on cross-sex hormones. At 14, he was misdiagnosed with "tall stature" and given higher doses to stunt his growth. The same doctors who threatened to remove him from his home if his mother didn't comply also falsified his medical records and sent him to sex shops for "treatment supplies." Eight years later, Jonni is speaking out about a medical scandal that turned vulnerable children into experimental subjects. This isn't just malpractice—it's systematic abuse disguised as healthcare, and Jonni's story exposes how the gender medicine industry operates in the shadows.See Jonni at The Bigger Picture: https://genspect.org/the-bigger-picture-albuquerque/Jonni Skinner spent eight years believing he was transgender after being medicalized at 13. Born in rural Michigan to a religious family, Jonni was diagnosed with high-functioning autism at 4 and struggled with being a feminine boy in a conservative environment. When puberty began triggering severe body dysmorphia and religious guilt about his attraction to males, his mother sought help at the University of Michigan's gender clinic. What followed was a systematic campaign of medical abuse that would steal Jonni's adolescence and leave lasting physical and psychological damage.

The gender medicine house of cards is collapsing in American courtrooms, and one lawyer is helping to pull it down brick by brick. While activists scream about "trans rights," Glenna Goldis is methodically exposing the fraud, deception, and child abuse hiding behind medical credentials. From Supreme Court victories to explosive document discoveries revealing WPATH's lies, the legal landscape has shifted dramatically against pediatric transition. But winning in court is just the beginning - Goldis wants Nuremberg-style trials and medical licenses revoked. She wants the people who did this to children to pay. In this conversation with Stella and Mia, she maps out how the law is finally catching up to the gender medicine scandal and what needs to happen next to ensure it never returns.See Glenna in Albuquerque. In-person & livestream tickets available: https://genspect.org/the-bigger-picture-albuquerque/

Why do so many fathers vanish from their children's lives? Adam Coleman argues it starts at birth - without holding their babies in those first crucial months, men never develop the chemical bond that keeps them present. The result: boys without fathers become men who can't regulate emotions, swinging from zero to a hundred over minor slights, filling prisons and chasing external validation through money and women. This conversation explores the uncomfortable truth that teaching boys emotional regulation might be a father's most critical role - and why figures like Andrew Tate appeal to a generation of men who never learned the difference between internal worth and external validation.

Dr. Gordon Guyatt revolutionized modern medicine. As a professor at McMaster University, he coined the term "evidence-based medicine" in 1991, created the hierarchy of evidence that every medical student learns, and wrote the User's Guide to the Medical Literature that taught physicians worldwide how to critically evaluate research. For 48 years, he's been the gold standard for rigorous scientific thinking in healthcare.Then came his systematic reviews of pediatric gender medicine. His team found only low-quality evidence for youth interventions. When twenty U.S. states used his work to restrict access to these treatments, Guyatt called it "egregious, unconscionable misuse of our work." But in this explosive interview, he admits signing a statement endorsing "medically necessary care for gender diverse youth" without reading it carefully. "That was not my paragraph, and I didn't read carefully enough," he confesses. When pressed further: "I was a dope. Okay. I'm sometimes a dope."

Premieres Thursday

Soren Aldaco was 11 when she discovered online fandom spaces where roleplay identities could become real identities—and 19 when a double mastectomy at the notorious Crane Center left her with massive hematomas the surgeons denied were happening. Now a detrans woman, graduate student, and Independent Women's Forum Ambassador, she's fighting for her case against Texas medical malpractice laws to reach the Supreme Court. In this conversation, she unpacks how "fantasy and reality" merged online, why every provider who pushed her toward medicalization had trans-identified family members, and what it means to survive both the physical complications and the ideological capture that enabled them. Soren will be speaking at Genspect’s upcoming Bigger Picture conference in Albuquerque.Support the show.