What you wrote DameMaud matches my listening experience. The way I interpret this:
I had a vague kind of anxiety all the way through listening that I can't explain.
is that to me there's a tension in the programme between the journalist (Polly Curtis) evidently recognising that things have gone very badly wrong and yet she is constrained from following the threads to some rather obvious conclusions.
For example Curtis paints Keira Bell as an outlier but didn't actually provide the audience with what the evidence was in the judgment, ie the medical pathway being a one-way inevitable journey. She suggested that there's no evidence that post-drugs (puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones) detransition is actually a thing which was surprising. It's part of a pattern of her identifying as being non-partisan while taking pot-shots at gender critical naratives to demonstrate her independence.
However, this can lead her to mislead the audience. Having discussed the impact of the Keira Bell judgment, she then disposed of it in a couple of sentences as having been overturned. This misses the point hugely, the Court of Appeal deciding to overturn the judgment was actually about the High Court having overreached its powers, but the devastating evidence revealed by at the lower level was left completely untouched by the Court of Appeal.
She said something like: what I'm trying to do in this podcast is to get past the binary arguments and say that lots of things are true. She wants to find a truth that's somewhere in the middle and her podcast of framed to steer things to this place. Her mission is to persuade her audience that there are "entrenched positions on both sides" and the right place to be is between them.
Curtis says that the story of the Tavistock is when "culture outpaces the science and then the politics kick in". This is a narrow expression of what has gone on. For someone who says she asks the questions that need to be asked, what about this question: What if giving puberty blockers to children, or at least to children beyond a core group that have had clinically diagnosed gender dyphoria from when they were a small child, is a terrible idea? Not asking this question fits in with her not discussing detransitioners at all beyond a few brief references in passing. I expect she'd say that these were issues beyond the scope of the programme looking into what had gone on in the Tavistock, but it just feels that this leaves a gaping hole at the centre of the podcast.
I also strongly disliked that in the final episode Curtis then framed the narrative, that is the true story, into two things:
the suicides of young people while on the waiting list, and
what happened at the Tavistock at the end, and related matters, were as a result of political meddling, and Curtis was then able to steer things onto the much more comfortable territory of "it's a familiar story of NHS scarcity compounded by a culture war."
These two aspects seemed to me like a Get Out of Jail Card meaning that other thorny issues throughout the podcast could minimised. This framing then became her "scoop" and I felt manipulated as Curtis delivered this framing.
Her background might be relevant:
Polly Curtis ... spent much of her career at the Guardian where she reported on health, social affairs and education, before joining the lobby team as Whitehall Editor, writing about government and policy. She went on to be digital editor of the Guardian, then led newsrooms as Editor-in-Chief at HuffPost UK, a Partner at Tortoise Media and Managing Director at PA Media.
Maybe what the podcast was actually about was a journalist struggling to escape from her own capture. But because of her background and networks, it's not completely successful and is painful to witness.
Overall, the podcast left me with the impression that gender identity ideology will fall apart. Curtis handled it very carefully but even she found it disintegrating in her hands. Contrast that with the gender critical approaches. She went after them in a number of different ways but did they disintegrate in a similar way?