Hi, I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland.

And I'm Sasha Ayyad, an adolescent therapist in the United States.

And this is Gender, a wider lens, a podcast dedicated to the shifting concepts around gender in our contemporary culture.

Through in-depth interviews, personal stories, and psychological exploration, we seek to open up the discourse around this hot button issue.

Join us as we look at gender from a wider lens.

Howdy Stella? How's it going Sasha, how are you? I'm well. We are here to recap some of our kind of most insightful and interesting takeaways from the bigger

picture conference in Lisbon Portugal which was several weeks now and it was a

very very interesting experience I think we have lots of things to say about it.

Yeah it was interesting I was talking to Helen Joyce afterwards and she said, you know, she was at the first conference in Calarney and she said back then it was just like, here we are, if you follow me. We are gender critical people and we have something to say. It was kind of, you know what I mean?

It was just after COVID and it was like our first coming together in a serious way of all the

different disciplines. And she said this time she missed Denver, she was not Denver but then she came to Lisbon and she said it's so much more structured or was such a bigger world, if you follow me, that we could have a whole sociological section, we could have a whole psychological, we could have a law section, we could have educational.

And you know, of course she's so incisive that she could see the, you know, the big changes that now we're in 2024 we really have moved as a movement into

I think we're really taking our place in the world as a very legitimate position to take on this complex issue.

And I thought that was a really good reflection of what happened in Lisbon.

Yeah and I mean along similar lines a lot of people who showed up first of all it was

in Portugal and so I was kind of originally expecting it would be mostly European attendees which of course there were tons I mean I met people from so many European countries

But also from all over the place. We had people from Australia, we had someone

from China, we had parents from the US, people from New Zealand. So it was remarkable, but something

that I kept hearing is, yeah, Japan, I kept hearing this couldn't have happened a few years ago.

So that kind of touches on what Helen was saying that this has really grown and become a much more, I mean there's so

much support for these ideas and these concepts and I think people are feeling like there's

more scaffolding and bravery to come and attend a conference and speak.

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