From Gay Man to Transwoman... and Back Again | Michael Kerr
25 June 2026
With Michael Kerr
UK
Michael Kerr is a Scottish detransitioned man whose journey through NHS gender services — including the Sandyford clinic — exposes repeated failures of clinical assessment and patient safety. A gay man who transitioned and later reversed that decision, Kerr found no statutory support waiting for him on the other side. He has since founded Detransition Pathway UK, a peer-led organisation addressing a gap that neither NHS England nor Scottish services have filled. His account lands at a moment when post-Cass reform is under scrutiny and the question of what the NHS owes to people harmed by gender pathways is live in policy debates.
Michael Kerr is a Scottish man who spent years living as a trans woman before concluding that transition had not resolved the underlying difficulties that had driven him towards it. A gay man who came to doubt the identity he had adopted, he eventually detransitioned and has since established Detransition Pathway UK, a peer-to-peer organisation designed to fill the support gap that NHS services have left for people walking back from medical and social transition. Kerr's account of his journey through the NHS is one of repeated failures in basic clinical duty of care. He describes how a GP referral set him on a pathway that did not adequately address the trauma history he brought with him. His experience at the Sandyford clinic — Scotland's principal gender service for adults — reflects concerns the Cass Review raised at a national level: that gender services frequently assessed gender identity in isolation, without the kind of thorough psychological evaluation that patients presenting with complex histories clearly required. His report that expressions of suicidal distress were not acted upon adds to a growing body of testimony about the clinical priorities inside NHS gender pathways. He speaks candidly about the physical effects of oestrogen and the permanent nature of some of those changes — evidence that informs the broader debate about the irreversibility of medical interventions and the degree to which patients receive realistic information at the outset. When doubts began to surface, he found that the same NHS structures that had facilitated his transition offered little in the way of honest re-evaluation. His account of returning to Sandyford and encountering an institutional culture resistant to questioning the direction of travel mirrors what other detransitioners and whistleblowers have described from within NHS gender services. The detransition process itself, Kerr explains, is largely unsupported by the NHS. There is no established clinical pathway, no co-ordinated referral system, and no consistent provision for the physical or psychological needs of people in his position. The Cass Review explicitly noted the absence of adequate follow-up data for those who had left gender services, and NHS England's subsequent service specification has not yet produced a functioning answer to the detransition question. In this vacuum, people are left to navigate the reversal of medical treatment, social re-adjustment, and significant mental health challenges largely alone. Detransition Pathway UK, the organisation Kerr has built in response, offers peer-to-peer support and practical resources for people at every stage of the detransition process. It represents a grassroots attempt to meet a need that neither NHS commissioners nor established third-sector gender organisations have prioritised. The episode also notes that Kerr was due to speak at the CAN-SG conference, Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine, held in London — a gathering that brings clinicians and researchers together to examine the evidence base and governance questions that remain unresolved following the closure of the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service.
