The Critical Compass Podcast - February 23, 2026


Discussing Fertility w⧸ Gender Dysphoric Kids Like 'Talking to a Blank Wall' ｜ Mia Hughes

Topics
adolescent fertility discussions
Mentioned
Michael Schellenberger
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Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

117.6

Word count

268

Sentence count

12


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Kelly reflects on her own journey to becoming a mother, and why we should never offer vasectomies or tubal ligation to adolescents, no matter how strongly they may insist that they will never want to have children.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 In the leaked WPATH files, internal communications from the World
00:00:06.640 Professional Association for Transgender Health, that Michael Schellenberger and
00:00:11.640 I released last year, a leading Canadian pediatric endocrinologist admitted
00:00:17.760 that discussing fertility preservation with a 14-year-old is like, and I quote,
00:00:22.720 talking to a blank wall. He also admitted that he sees significant regret about
00:00:30.280 fertility loss in his patients when they reach adulthood. Now I know this to be
00:00:36.400 true because I, at 14, like so many other women, was that blank wall. All the way
00:00:44.140 into my late 20s, I was adamant that I would never want children, and then at
00:00:49.600 30, it was as if someone flipped a switch inside me, and I needed to have a baby
00:00:55.600 right away. True story.
00:01:04.360 And today, at 47, I'm the proud mother of three children.
00:01:11.360 And they've brought more joy into my life than my teenage self ever could have
00:01:19.880 imagined. This is a completely normal life trajectory. It's the reason we would
00:01:27.600 never offer vasectomies or tubal ligation to adolescents, no matter how
00:01:32.320 strenuously they may insist that they will never want to be parents. Everything we
00:01:38.500 know about adolescent development tells us that this is a life stage defined by
00:01:44.140 experimentation and change. It's a period of identity exploration, where young people
00:01:51.580 try on different selves, when beliefs are held with passionate conviction one day only
00:01:57.580 to be discarded the next. And because we know that adolescents don't have fixed, stable identities,
00:02:05.500 we should also know that permanent irreversible medical interventions that
00:02:10.740 imprint adolescent identities onto the body could never be appropriate or ethical.