Inside Europe's Transgender Medicine System with Róisín Michaux
27 August 2026
With Róisín Michaux
Europe
Irish journalist Róisín Michaux conducted undercover investigations across Europe into how minors—including those with autism—access gender-related medical interventions. Her findings expose the patchwork of online prescribers, cross-border surgical referrals and clinic networks that operate largely beyond national regulatory oversight, raising urgent questions about safeguarding standards and informed consent for vulnerable young people.
Róisín Michaux is an Irish journalist based in Brussels whose investigative work has taken her into some of the least scrutinised corners of European gender medicine. In this episode she details the methods and findings of an undercover operation in which she posed as a distressed, autistic teenage girl seeking gender-related medical care—documenting in granular detail the pathways that real young people navigate across Ireland and the wider European Union. Central to her account is the fragmentation of Ireland's gender service landscape: the split of the national service has created gaps that minors and their families actively exploit, often turning to online providers operating outside any single national regulatory framework. Michaux examined platforms such as Gender GP and Gender Plus, as well as Imago, a service engaged in cross-border prescribing—raising immediate questions about which country's clinical standards, if any, govern a prescription issued in one jurisdiction and administered in another. Her undercover probe extended to clinics in Madrid willing to perform mastectomies on minors from other EU member states. This accessibility stands in stark contrast to the increasingly cautious stances taken by health authorities in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the United Kingdom following systematic evidence reviews. The willingness of some clinics to proceed without the safeguards now mandated in those countries illustrates how regulatory divergence across Europe can function, in practice, as a bypass mechanism for vulnerable young patients. The episode also examines the Antwerp youth gender clinic in Belgium and the broader WPATH-affiliated pipeline through which young people move from initial referral to irreversible intervention. This architecture—online communities, digital prescribers, cross-border surgeries—operates largely outside the scrutiny applied to conventional paediatric medicine, despite the permanence of the outcomes it produces. Michaux's investigation raises pressing questions about the relationship between affirmation-first clinical models and safeguarding obligations toward autistic and otherwise vulnerable adolescents. The tension she documents—between suicide-risk protocols built around immediate affirmation and growing evidence that thorough psychological assessment reduces harm—is precisely the fault line that has driven policy reversals in Sweden, Finland and Norway, and the Cass Review findings in the United Kingdom. For clinicians and policymakers tracking the evidence, her reporting offers a ground-level account of what regulatory gaps look like in practice and why pan-European consistency in youth safeguarding has become a matter of urgency.
