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The Protocol

New York Times

2025 • Producer

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.

On June 18, 2025, The Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee ban on transgender care for minors. That decision allows similar bans to continue in more than 20 other states.

And it comes as the Trump administration is targeting the care - threatening to go after the hospitals and doctors who continue to provide it around the country.

"The Protocol" is the story of this care - where it came from, who it was meant to help, and how legal and political fights in the U.S. came to endanger it.

Selected Works

  • Episode One: 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.

  • Episode Two: 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 society that is still hostile to trans people.

  • Episode Three: 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, demand increases worldwide as the types of patients seeking care change.

  • Episode Four: 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 only way to fix it.

  • Episode Five: 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 weak." One major medical group argues that's missing the point - and repeating history.

  • Episode Six: 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 gender treatments. We hear from kids, parents and providers caught in the middle about the complicated decisions they are making.