The Protocol
A six-part podcast exploring the story of medical treatment for transgender young people — how the care began, the lives it changed, and the legal and political fights that could end it in the United States.
- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 37 minutes
- Episodes
- 7
- Years Active
- 2025
The Now
State bans are enacted. The Supreme Court is poised to weigh in. President Trump declares that there are only two genders and threatens to withhold federal funds from hospitals that provide pediatric…
The Review
The heated debate is not limited to the U.S. In England, a pediatrician tasked with figuring out how the country’s health care system should provide the care finds that the evidence is “remarkably we…
The Whistleblower
A small Midwestern gender clinic gets consumed by a growing political fight when a whistleblower goes public. She had begun to see the treatments as harmful, and decided the political route was the o…
The American Approach
In Boston, a psychologist helps set up the first youth gender clinic in the U.S., adapting the Dutch approach. Across the country, a rising star in the field questions their methods. Meanwhile, deman…
The Gender Kids
The new treatment is codified into a protocol, and the Dutch publish a landmark study that launches the field of youth gender medicine. A former patient describes the benefit of early treatment in a …
The Beginning
The story of youth gender medicine starts in The Netherlands, with a clinical psychologist and a 16 year-old who was determined to go through life as the gender he long felt he was.
Introducing ‘The Protocol’
Since 2021, nearly half the states in the U.S. have passed bans on medical treatments for transgender minors. The Trump administration is now targeting the care, and in the coming weeks, the Supreme …