Reading · Kinnon Ross MacKinnon

Starting this week, I’m on a 2 month parental leave. While I’ll be maintaining about 2 days per week to keep key research items moving, I’m released from teaching for the term. Later in 2026, I’ll be heading into sabbatical and a visiting professorship at the Sorbonne in Paris.

This post will provide a summary of what I was up to over the last year and upcoming stuff planned for 2026. I’ll also provide links to recent recorded talks/interviews/podcasts/writing.

While the issue of detransition/regret came up in my phd work, I became increasingly curious about it in 2020, during Bell v Tavistock (the legal case that in many ways was ground zero for the changes in pediatric trans care we’ve seen roll out ever since).

In 2021, me and my team wrote a grant proposal to fund what would become the Re/DeTrans Canada study. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the first study to examine detransition and transition regret in Canada in about thirty years.

Since then, I led a much larger-scale study with a team of LGBTQ+ researchers, called the DARE study. I also launched The One Percent on substack with a colleague in Spain, Pablo Expósito-Campos. Pablo is a clinical psychologist who’s also been studying transition care and detransition among Spanish-speaking people. Between our three studies, we collected and analyzed data from about 1000 people who report experiences that fall under the concept of “detransition”—stopping, shifting, or reversing an initial gender transition.

The mainstream narrative about the politicization of pediatric trans medicine is that right wing conservatives (and TERFs) are attacking trans children and gender-diversity itself. That is indeed an element of it, for sure, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. That view misses the human, non-human, technological, and ideological elements driving power struggles within and external to trans medicine (think actor-network theory).

I may write more in-depth about this in the future, but what has actually unfolded over the last decade has also has to do with identity, beliefs, politics, and paradigm debates in science. An epistemic clash has exploded between divergent identity-based coalitions who all have a vested stake in the matter, and are pursuing their own epistemic truths via socio-political mechanisms.

As an example, after one media interview I did in 2024, a trans-affirming psychiatrist in the US reached out to let me know that she’d had a youth detransition, but she struggled to find a care provider willing to accept her referral of a detransitioning patient. The youth’s mother, who had belonged to a trans-positive parent social network, apparently also lost her support network of other trans-affirming parents of trans youth (because her child detransitioned). Me and my team have written about similar dynamics—people detransitioning and losing access to trans peer support networks, or having difficulty finding adequate care providers during detransition, instead turning for information and resources within informal detrans online networks.

I recently came across a paper written by philosopher Dan Williams about identity-defining beliefs and belief-based coalitions that provided a new lens to interpret what I’d been noticing. Williams (2022) explains that:

“identity-defining beliefs often drive a form of motivated cognition in which people unconsciously subordinate the pursuit of truth to the goal of maintaining their group identity” (p. 45).

and

“the appearance of uniform opinion within belief-based communities online is rarely simply a consequence of constricted information exposure and connection with like-minded others; it is often actively sustained by motivations to signal group identity and punish heretics.” (p. 52).

The paper presents an immensely helpful framework that’s useful to make sense of trans medicine as an area of healthcare that’s been deeply coloured by scientific paradigm debates and a decade of online discourse and dynamics within trans, detrans, trans parent, and trans-skeptical/self-identified “ROGD parent” online networks.

Even still, and as I told Dr. Laura T on her TransNormal podcast, we are faced with both anti-trans politics and real ethical questions in pediatric trans care. When there is an emergent group of young patients who report unexpected outcomes/treatment harm following a novel treatment pathway, it’s a crucial job of researchers to step up and find answers.

Below is a recap of some of me and my team’s outputs.

I gave far fewer talks in 2025 compared to 2024. I did 6 in 2025, compared to 12 in 2024. This was partially because I had fewer invites, but I also decided to decline a few invites to dedicate more time to book-writing.

Talks

I did grand rounds for the pediatrics department at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. I presented following the pediatric trans care clinic there. I felt the presentations nicely complemented each other.

MacKinnon, K.R. (October, 2025). Exploring the landscape of pediatric trans medicine: past, present, and futures. CHEO. Ottawa, Ontario.

I delivered one keynote for the 25th annual medical ethics public lecture at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s.

MacKinnon, K.R. (March 2025). Goldilocks and the three bears of gender medicine: Examining histories of clinical and bioethical debates. 25^th Annual College of Physicians and Surgeons of Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Ethics Public Lecture. Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

This talk provided an overview of the history of transgender medicine, focusing on the intersections between attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people and clinical ethics. I presented on key contemporary ethical issues as well.

On the very same day, I Zoomed into the Moving Trans History Forward bi-annual conference held at the University of Victoria. Together with some research assistants and volunteers on the DARE study, we presented on community engagement and insights we learned from studying detransition/retransition. This talk was not recorded, but two write-ups about the conference are available here and here.

MacKinnon, K.R., Rosen, M., Rudd, S., Gould, W.A. (March 28, 2025). The DARE study: Community-led research on detransition/retransition. Moving Trans History Forward Conference. University of Victoria.

I joined a panel with colleagues at an autism research conference. The panel examined the state of the science on the intersections between transness, gender dysphoria, autism, and how these all interface with clinical care and politics. I wrote a previous post about the travel precautions I had taken before crossing the US border as a Canadian trans academic.

MacKinnon, K.R. (May 2, 2025). Care experiences of autistic LGBTQ+ people who have stopped/reversed a gender transition. Panel: Gender diversity and autism: Complex socio-political environments. International Society for Autism Research Conference. Seattle, United States.

Myself and DARE research assistants were invited to do a presentation and training for a youth care / mental health organization called YouthRex. Without me, they later did an in-person training using roughly the same presentation for the Toronto Public Library, as part of their LGBTQ+ training for librarians and library staff!

Para, A. MacGregor, G., Rosen, M.S. & MacKinnon, K.R. (June 17, 2025). Affirming and caring for 2SLGBTQ+ young people who detransition/retransition. YouthRex. York University/virtual presentation. Access:

Podcasts/Writing/Media**

On my own or co-authored, I published a few pieces with Dr. Awais Aftab’s Psychiatry at the Margins.

NYT Guest Essay:

MacKinnon, K.R. (August 10, 2025). The truth about detransitioning. The New York Times.

Read it for free here.

A podcast discussion on TransNormal with Dr. Laura Targownik:

Goldbauer, A. & Keig, Z. (January, 2025). Transgender healthcare, detransition, and the DARE study. Podcast interview. The Umbrella Hour. January 10, 2025. Access.

Hoff, T. (March, 2025) Ethics Talk. Regret in the moral psychology of surgical professionalism. Podcast interview. American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. March 2025. Access.

Rummler, O. (November 2025). Detransition is key to politicians’ anti-trans agenda. But what’s it really like? Access.

Ghorayshi, A. & Mitchell, A. (June, 2025). The protocol. The New York Times. Podcast. Access.

**I don’t keep close track of news media articles or podcasts that discuss studies I’ve authored. I know it’s something we’re supposed to do as academics, but I don’t have a great system to keep track. In general, I usually try to make time to speak with journalists when I’m contacted, but sometimes my research is written about without having ever been contacted or asked to provide comments. Other times, I have provided really lengthy interviews that are never published ( I have critiques of mainstream coverage of detransition and trans medicine, like many others do).

Academic papers

Here I’m just including some papers from the DARE study that were published this year where I was either the first author or I was directing involved in mentoring students as first authors. These include the study design and sampling methods paper, and some more papers that present key findings. We have a few more papers in the peer review process, either at a first-stage submission, or nearing the finish line after more than a year of peer review (fingers crossed).

MacKinnon, K.R., Khan, N., Newman, K. Exposito-Campos, P., Gould, W.A., Pullen Sansfaçon, A., Rudd, S., & Lam, J.H.S. (2025). A latent class analysis of interrupted gender transitions and detransitions in the United States and Canada. Archives of Sexual Behavior, online first. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-025-03264-6
MacKinnon, K.R., Expósito-Campos, P., Lam, S.H., Anderson, T. & Khatchadourian, K. (2025). Understanding and caring for adolescents and young adults who are considering or pursuing a detransition process. Pediatric Annals 54(10), e361-e366. DOI: 10.3928/19382359-20250828-06
Rackliff, K., Expósito-Campos, P., Wren Ariel Gould, W.A., Kinitz, D.J., Rosen, M.S., Rudd, S., Lam, J.S.H., Pullen Sansfaçon, A., & MacKinnon, K.R. (2025). “Providers had no idea what to do with me”: A mixed-methods analysis of detransition/retransition support, care, and information needs among sexual and gender minority individuals. International Journal of Transgender Health https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2025.2538744
MacKinnon, K.R., Khan, N., Newman, K. Marshall, G., Gould, W.A., Salway, T., Pullen Sansfaçon, A., Kia, H., & Lam, J. H. S. (2025). Introducing novel methods to identify fraudulent responses (Sampling with Sisyphus): Web-based LGBTQ2S+ mixed-methods study. Journal of Medical Internet Research 27, e63252. https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e63252
MacKinnon, K.R., Kia, H., Gould, W.A., Ross, L.E., Abramovich, A., & Lam, J.H.S. (2025). A typology of pathways to gender detransition: Considerations for care practices with transgender and gender-diverse people who stop or reverse their gender transition. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 12(1), 142-153. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000678

Fails

Because 2026 is the ten year anniversary of the CV of Failures meme that brought joy (and schadenfreude?) to many academics, I will mention a couple of mine. This year, I spent a ton of time writing a couple of applications for major awards that were ultimately unsuccessful. This time last year, I shortened my holiday break in order to make a deadline to apply for one of these awards (SSHRC Impact-Connection). For it, I ended up selected to go forward as my university’s nomination for the national competition (which was a huge honour in and of itself). But I didn’t end up making the national short-list. It didn’t surprise me, but still a bit of a disappointment, all things considered.

Book manuscript

The biggest project I have on the go right now is finishing up the first full draft of Understanding Detransition. It’s under contract with Polity Press. Co-authored with Pablo Expositó-Campos, the book was dreamed up during his three-month research visit with me at YorkU in summer 2024. We’ve already written a good chunk of it together. Various chapters are currently being reviewed by several academics in history, critical psychiatry, bioethics, and a couple detransitioned people. Here’s what happened that led to the book project:

Depending on a few factors, like the peer review time, it should be published by late 2026 or early 2027.

Trans-Detrans Mad Studies Hub event

As a knowledge mobilization event for the DARE study, I’m putting on a half-day symposium event to put transness, madness, and detransition together in conversation. A couple DARE study presentations will be featured, complemented by additional speakers from a range of disciplines. We’re gearing up for some thought-provoking panels and open discussion. More information will be available around mid-January, but the event is slated for the end of February.

Visiting professorships

Later in 2026, during sabbatical, I’ll be visiting a few universities in Western Europe, including academic trans care clinics. The main visiting professorship I’ve lined up is at Sorbonne University in Paris, but I’ll also make a visit to Amsterdam and other spots. If you are an academic in the UK or Western Europe with similar research interests, feel free to reach out.

Because my partner is on maternity leave for 12 months, we’re able to travel abroad with our 2 children during sabbatical. It seems like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so we’re just going for it! France was specifically selected as a target country for sabbatical because my partner and our 5-year-old are bilingual (English/French).

I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be able to write on Substack over the coming months, but I do have some ideas lined up for The One Percent (mostly rough content we’ve already written for the book).

Thanks so much for following along and for sharing some of your thoughts and questions along the way. Have a very happy and joyous new year.

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Where we've been and where we're going (2025-2026)

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