A version of this story appeared in the Higher Ground newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Higher Ground delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday.
The biggest threat to “gender-affirming care” might come not from state bans for minors but from scarred young women like Soren Aldaco, Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley.
The three are among a growing number of people who have detransitioned. They were prescribed drugs and underwent breast removals in their teens to adopt an opposite-sex identity and later realized they preferred their sex assigned at birth.
They are suing the medical professionals who signed off on puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries. They accuse the physicians of rushing them into gender-reassignment treatment as a fix for their mental health problems without adequate screenings or warnings about the long-term physical and psychological risks.
“These lawsuits are rightfully a huge threat to the ‘gender-affirming care industry’ because they are exposing the dark side of a dangerous agenda that is hurting an untold number of vulnerable teens,” said Charles LiMandri, whose San Diego County law firm, in partnership with the Center for American Liberty, represents three people who have detransitioned.
Mr. LiMandri said about a dozen such lawsuits are percolating nationwide and predicted that “we’re going to see more and more of these cases.”
“The more that come out, the more that will likely have the courage to come out,” he told The Washington Times. “This is going to start having a cascading effect.”
The billion-dollar U.S. sex-reassignment business is booming among people younger than 25. About 1.4% of those ages 13-17 identify as transgender, nearly double the 2017 figure. About 0.5% of all adults identify as transgender, according to a 2022 report by the Williams Institute, a public policy think tank at the UCLA School of Law focusing on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Pushing back on the industry are conservative-leaning state legislatures. Twenty-two have barred minors from accessing gender-reassignment drugs and surgeries — 23 with Arizona, which prohibits only surgeries — over the objections of transgender rights activists.
Such laws are unlikely to spread to liberal-leaning states. What could chill the gender-transition market in those jurisdictions is the potential for seven-figure jury awards and settlements against major medical providers.
“The state Legislature of California is not going to be outlawing this anytime soon,” said Mr. LiMandri. “So the lawsuits are the best hope to bring sanity in states like California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, where the kids are basically at the mercy of these health care providers who have run amok on these issues and are just pushing an agenda.”
His clients include Ms. Cole, who filed the first lawsuit in February after detransitioning. Her complaint says Kaiser Permanente of California “grossly breached the standard of care by pushing Chloe into this harmful experimental treatment regimen,” which included testosterone injections starting at age 13 and removing her breasts at age 15.
Instead of improving, her mental health problems worsened. Now 19, she says the “people that did this to me need to be held accountable.”
“They withheld a lot of information from us, but even then at the age I was, I just wasn’t capable of giving informed consent,” Ms. Cole said in a video interview with the Independent Women’s Forum. “It’s seriously affected both my mental and physical health. I’m still recovering to this day. I don’t know if I’ll be able to conceive a child or safely carry to term, and I certainly won’t be able to breastfeed.”
In a statement, Kaiser Permanente said its “transgender care” services are “aligned to guidelines endorsed by major medical associations.”
“When adolescent patients, with parental consent, seek gender-affirming care, the patient’s care team carefully evaluates their treatment options and then a multidisciplinary team of physicians and other experienced professionals are available to provide the patient and their family with information, counseling, and other support,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser, one of the nation’s largest health care providers, said such decisions “always rest with the patient and their parents or guardians and, in every case, we respect the right of patients and their families to make informed decisions about their personal health.”
Kayla Lovdahl, who goes by the name Layla Jane, sued Kaiser in June. She accuses doctors of “experimenting” on her by placing her on puberty blockers at age 12 and performing a double mastectomy at age 13.
“Defendants did not question, elicit, or attempt to understand the psychological events that led Kayla to the mistaken belief that she was transgender, nor did they evaluate, appreciate, or treat her multi-faceted presentation of co-morbid symptoms,” said the filing in California Superior Court in Stockton.
Specialized law firm
A law firm established in Dallas this year is dedicated to “seeking justice nationwide for those detransitioners and others who have suffered harm due to medical malpractice, fraud, and other healthcare-related wrongs.”
Campbell Miller Payne has filed lawsuits on behalf of four people since July. The firm’s lawyers have been in discussions with another 40 potential clients. Founding partner Jordan Campbell calls it “only the beginning.”
“Our clients got sucked into this — got taken advantage of, frankly — when they were in deeply vulnerable positions as young women, and then five, six, seven years later, they realize, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I done?’ And they sort of wake up,” Mr. Campbell told The Times.
His clients include Ms. Mosley, who started testosterone injections at 17 and had both breasts removed at 18, and Ms. Aldaco, who said she was prescribed cross-sex hormones at 17 without her parents’ knowledge and underwent a double mastectomy at 19.
A third client, Isabelle Ayala, sued the doctors who put her on testosterone at 14 — and kept her on the injections even after a suicide attempt — and the American Academy of Pediatrics over its “affirmative-care” guidance, which has become the widely used standard on youth gender treatment.
Those who detransition typically start taking estrogen to reverse some of the damage from the testosterone, but some changes can’t be reversed. Their jawlines are often stronger, their shoulders broader. Their voices sound more like those of teenage boys than girls.
Other issues for those reversing their transitions from female to male include vaginal atrophy and dryness, pain from bone density complications, higher risk of cardiovascular disease and unwanted facial and body hair that requires them to shave regularly even after stopping testosterone and starting estrogen hormonal treatment.
“They have to shave their face every week, typically,” Mr. Campbell said. “Some have gotten laser hair removal to help, but it doesn’t necessarily totally work.”
The kicker is that insurance companies that cover puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones typically don’t pay for estrogen and other treatment to detransition, he said.
LGBTQ rights advocates argue that a tiny percentage of transgender people choose to detransition and the decision to adopt their sex assigned at birth is frequently based on external factors such as family and societal pressure.
“Detransition is rare, and is often the result of environmental factors rather than regret,” the Human Rights Campaign said.
Critics of such findings argue that follow-up studies typically don’t include those who have stopped gender-transition treatment.
The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged some of the legislation in conservative states and won an injunction against the Indiana ban in June, weeks before it was scheduled to take effect.
“Gender-affirming care is lifesaving care for our clients, and they’re terrified of what will happen if this law is allowed to take effect,” said Ken Falk, ACLU of Indiana legal director. “No child should be cut off from the medical care they need or denied their fundamental right to be themselves — but this law would do both.”
Why the sudden wave of detransitioning? Mr. LiMandri traced the transgender surge to Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner, who announced eight years ago that “I am a woman” and changed his name to Caitlyn Jenner.
The celebrity athlete was known to teen audiences as Kris Jenner’s husband on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” the hit reality television series that also featured daughters Kendall Jenner, a supermodel, and cosmetics mogul Kylie Jenner.
“It typically takes seven to 10 years [in malpractice cases] for people to realize they made a terrible mistake,” Mr. LiMandri said. “And all of this started happening with teenage girls when Bruce Jenner came out in 2015, so we’re kind of right at that mark where you would expect to start seeing it.”
Before that, he said, studies showed most people undergoing gender transitions were middle-aged men and, to a lesser extent, boys who began identifying as female as toddlers. More than two-thirds of those seeking to transition were born female.
Boston Children’s Hospital opened the first U.S. pediatric gender clinic in 2007. An estimated 100 such centers are now operating.
Whether the detransitioner lawsuits can sway a courtroom remains to be seen. None of the lawsuits has gone before a jury, and some are now in mandatory arbitration. They also face obstacles such as statutes of limitations that may elapse before patients sour on their transitions.
“The problem is medical codes governing medical malpractice in most states just aren’t built to handle this, which makes it novel and a bit of an uphill challenge from a timing perspective,” Mr. Campbell said. “That’s one of our initial significant hurdles in most of our cases.”
Children’s Hospital Colorado, citing safety concerns over harassment, announced in July that it would cease gender-transition surgeries for patients 18 and older. The hospital said it never performed surgeries on minors.
Mr. LiMandri predicted that the medical community would one day look back on medicalized gender transitions with the same contrition as lobotomies and the overprescription of opioids.
“There’s precedent for this type of almost mass hysteria in the medical industry, unfortunately, and we’re seeing it. But it can’t go on indefinitely. It’s too irrational,” Mr. LiMandri said. “And the truth can and will emerge. And if it has to emerge in the context of these lawsuits with juries coming down with big awards, then so be it.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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