(Alliance Defending Freedom) — “Your daughter is a boy, and if you want to save her life, you’ll refer to her by her preferred name and male pronouns.”
This was the advice a mental health provider gave Tammy Fournier when she sought help for her daughter’s anxiety, depression, and feelings of discomfort with her body.
Thankfully, Tammy chose not to treat her daughter as a boy, and with support and love, her daughter grew comfortable with her sex. But many doctors have used similar tactics to pressure parents and their children to pursue harmful transition efforts – efforts that often extend far beyond names and pronouns.
A growing number of people who have fallen victim to doctors’ misleading statements and guidance about puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for “gender transition” are speaking up about the harm they endured, and some of them are taking their healthcare providers to court.
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Who are detransitioners?
Broadly speaking, detransitioners are individuals who have chosen to stop receiving dangerous transition drugs or pursuing other body-altering procedures that doctors said would resolve their mental health struggles or discomfort with their sex. Detransitioners have typically come to embrace their biological sex and no longer wish to identify inconsistently with it.
Tragically, some transition efforts are irreversible. When a doctor removes a young woman’s healthy breasts, for example, she will never be able to nurse her children. And prescribing dangerous puberty-blocking drugs can cause irreversible damage on a child’s brain development and even affect a young woman’s ability to later conceive. Healthcare professionals who tell parents and young people that these drugs and procedures are “safe and reversible” are lying.
Doctors who push their patients to undergo these dangerous “gender transition” efforts fail to follow the basic medical dictate to “do no harm.”
Research calls gender transition drugs and procedures into question
Recent research has shown the glaring flaws in the argument that transition drugs and procedures are appropriate or helpful for minors. In England, a review by Dr. Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, found “remarkably weak evidence” for the effectiveness of using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and permanent surgeries on children with gender dysphoria. Dr. Cass concluded that “we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
And according to leaked files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), some doctors understood many of the concerns about pushing such drugs and procedures on minors – but did so anyway.
During an online WPATH panel discussion, one doctor noted that some of the children they subjected to experimental treatments “haven’t even had biology in high school yet.” Another said, “It’s out of their developmental range sometimes to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.” But none of that stopped WPATH from encouraging children to undergo these interventions.
Detransitioner lawsuits are on the rise
As medical professionals have failed in their duty to heal and not hurt their patients, some detransitioners are beginning to seek legal remedies. Josh Payne, an attorney who co-founded the law firm Campbell Miller Payne, PLLC, says that detransitioner lawsuits stem from the fact that patients were not only harmed but lied to by those with whom they entrusted their care.
Payne says that healthcare professionals have deceived patients by telling them that harmful drugs and procedures are going to be the answer to their problems when, in reality, they cause physical and psychological harm. Three active lawsuits filed by Campbell Miller Payne highlight the importance of holding the medical profession accountable.
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Prisha Mosley
At the age of 14, Prisha Mosley endured a series of catastrophic and life-changing events. She was sexually assaulted, became pregnant, and suffered a miscarriage. At 15, Prisha was hospitalized for depression, and by 16, she was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and an eating disorder. But instead of providing Prisha with loving support and medical care, her doctors and counselors lied to her.
At 16, despite Prisha’s history of sexual assault and years-long history of documented mental health disorders, a resident determined after one visit that she was having a “gender identity crisis” and that was the underlying medical problem for all her mental health struggles.
Shortly thereafter, according to court documents, Prisha’s pediatrician – who was supposed to be treating Prisha for insomnia and OCD – began guiding her to pursue harmful transition drugs without her parents’ knowledge or consent.
When Prisha’s parents found out, the pediatrician and a counselor convinced them that Prisha was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and needed to make severe changes to her body to look more like a boy and to improve her mental health.
Soon after, Prisha was put on testosterone, and when she turned 18, doctors performed a double mastectomy on her. Years later, Prisha would realize – her voice deep, her body in almost constant pain, her breasts permanently gone – that she’d been lied to by those she trusted to care for her health. Thankfully, today she’s fully embraced who she is as a woman. But a corrupt medical establishment manipulated and forever changed the course of her life.
Prisha still lives with many of the irreversible effects of the drugs and procedures she was given. She has lost the ability to sing; she experiences chronic pain from the effects of the testosterone, including the redistribution of muscle and fat which her female frame cannot support; and she endures excessive hair growth all over her body. She also must live with phantom breast syndrome and the inability to nurse her child.
In July 2023, Campbell Miller Payne filed a lawsuit on Prisha’s behalf. While nothing can reverse the horror Prisha went through, she hopes a favorable ruling could help save others.
“The pain of imagining that someone else could feel or experience what I am experiencing makes the pain of being a public case study numb,” she told the New York Post. “It doesn’t compare. No one came and saved me when I was little. No one told me the truth.”
Isabelle Ayala
Like Prisha, Isabelle Ayala endured unimaginable pain when she was sexually assaulted around the age of 7. She later began harming herself, and she also experienced early-onset puberty.
Instead of providing Isabelle the counseling and care she needed, Dr. Jason Rafferty and other healthcare professionals at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, told her that attempting to change her sex was the path to healing.
The doctors put Isabelle on testosterone, but it did not have the effect the doctors had promised. Eight months after she started taking this drug, Isabelle attempted suicide. Shockingly, Dr. Rafferty and his colleagues continued the so-called “treatments.”
Isabelle eventually moved away from Rhode Island and stopped taking testosterone. She no longer struggles with her sex, but the negative effects of being prescribed the hormone remain. Campbell Miller Payne filed a lawsuit against the healthcare professionals who harmed Isabelle in October 2023.
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“The changes the testosterone have had on her body are a constant reminder that she needed an unbiased medical expert willing to evaluate her mental health and provide her the care she needed, rather than a group of ideologues set on promoting their own agenda and furthering a broader conspiracy at her expense,” the lawsuit states.
In addition to the healthcare professionals, Isabelle is also suing the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for its role in advancing false statements about the efficacy of the drugs it encouraged. Dr. Rafferty and others worked to create a radical policy statement at AAP advocating for experimental drugs and procedures for children with gender dysphoria. Isabelle’s attorneys say the policy statement helped establish an “entirely new model of treatment” based on “outright fraudulent representations.”
Cristina Hineman
Cristina Hineman is on the autism spectrum and has struggled with depression, anxiety, self-harm, and gender dysphoria. Shortly after she turned 18 in November 2021, Cristina made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood location in Hudson, New York, that provides dangerous transition drugs to those struggling with their sex.
Instead of taking the time to work through Cristina’s mental health struggles, Planned Parenthood prescribed Cristina testosterone gel after an appointment of just 30 minutes. As in the cases of Prisha and Isabelle, the testosterone didn’t magically solve her problems as Planned Parenthood and so many YouTubers and social media influencers Cristina watched claimed that it would.
“I was brainwashed,” Cristina shares. “A lot of people say that adults should be able to do whatever they want. But if you have mental illness that’s clouding your view, or you’re so misinformed about what gender dysphoria even means, then you cannot consent to such invasive treatments.”
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After enduring the harmful effects of cross-sex hormones for a little over a year and undergoing an irreversible surgery to remove her healthy breasts, Cristina realized she did not want to change her sex. She stopped taking testosterone, but many of the side effects remain.
Campbell Miller Payne filed a lawsuit in April 2024 against the healthcare providers who took advantage of Cristina, including the Planned Parenthood nurse practitioner who prescribed testosterone when she was 18 and the plastic surgeon who removed her healthy breasts when she was 19.
Cristina is hoping her story will help other young people struggling with gender dysphoria realize that harmful cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries will only make their struggles worse, not better.
Each of us is created either male or female, and those sexes cannot be changed. People struggling with gender dysphoria or feeling uncomfortable with their bodies deserve real care and support, not experimental, life-altering drugs and procedures that inflict immense pain and often irreversible damage.
The lawsuits above and many others like them demonstrate the betrayal, loss, and suffering that result when healthcare professionals lie to their patients, putting gender ideology over their oath to do no harm.
Reprinted with permission from the Alliance Defending Freedom.