We often talk about the dangers of the transgender medical industry, but these realities can only be truly understood by looking closely at the individuals pushed down this path, the mental and physical distress of the young men and women who attempt these transitions, and the grieving family members who are left behind.
Legacy media have disregarded their stories while promoting tales of happily transitioned children and adults, suggesting that very few people regret their gender transitions and most flourish under hormones and surgeries. This could not have been further from the truth for Prisha Mosley, a young woman who attempted to transition to become a man while she was a teenager.
Prisha had lived a hard life for such a young girl—she has described an alcoholic mother, trouble at home, a chaotic household. As her home life deteriorated, so did her mental health. She developed a severe eating disorder and was diagnosed with a personality disorder, anorexia, bulimia, possible schizophrenia, depression, and more. And at 14 years old, she was raped by an adult in her life, causing her to become pregnant and ultimately miscarry her baby.
She was young, and traumatized, and naive, and so she decided that she was raped because she was a girl and that rape only happened to girls. Her views of female sexuality were already heavily impacted by the hardcore pornography she’d been exposed to throughout her childhood—she viewed sex as only pleasurable to men and degrading to women.
And as she dove deeper and deeper into online groups on the internet, she fell prey to pro-transgender activists, who insisted to her that she must be transgender. It was with their encouragement, and the help of a WPATH-certified therapist, that Prisha was quickly able to obtain testosterone to get her started down what she was led to believe was the path to becoming a man.
Her mother sobbed when the doctor (who was disinterested in Prisha’s eating disorder and other comorbidities) prescribed Prisha testosterone. In her gut, Prisha’s mother knew this wasn’t right, and she emotionally asked the doctor if she was positively sure this was right for her daughter.
“Yes, Christine, yes,” the mother says she was told. And so she trusted the doctor, believing that she was better equipped, better educated, to handle this situation. She had been sold the lie, like many parents, that Prisha would kill herself if she didn’t undergo “gender-affirming care”—and like so many other parents, Prisha’s mother was asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
No parent should be forced into such a choice, premised on such a horrible lie.
And so Prisha went on testosterone. She had no idea what kind of physical and emotional turmoil she was signing up for. She expected, and hoped for, some changes—deepening of the voice, increased growth and thickness of body and facial hair, developing an Adam’s apple. Yet she had not expected the embarrassing and painful “bottom growth” that she quickly experienced, as the testosterone uncomfortably enlarged her clitoris, to the point where she could no longer “wear panties anymore.”
Soon she found that her voice was seriously affected: she could no longer scream, and though she formerly had a beautiful, operatic voice, she could no longer sing. She developed intense feelings of rage, prompting her father to push her to chop wood outside with an ax, to get her anger out.
Doctors had promised her that this gender affirming care would cure her mental health issues, her suicidality. But as Prisha progressed on testosterone, she found that it was only making things worse. She attributed this to the fact that she hadn’t had the long-awaited top surgery yet, or that she hadn’t been on hormones long enough yet, or that she hadn’t had a hysterectomy yet.
And so, at the age of eighteen, she underwent a double mastectomy, and medical professionals removed her breasts forever.
Like many women who undergo a double mastectomy for transition purposes, Prisha’s surgeon removed her nipples, reshaped them, and then reattached them to her chest. Yet they’re merely decorative. She’ll never be able to breastfeed her children, and when she did have a baby boy last year, she discovered that not all her breast tissue had been removed, and her milk came in as a response to prolactin, causing her severe pain.
When her baby lies on her chest, her chest is hard. Her shoulders are “broad and heavy,” and her waist and hips are “too small and narrow,” her lawsuit says. She suffers from vaginal atrophy, and her attorneys expected that she would be unable to conceive. To put it simply, Prisha suffered, and continues to suffer, “severe physical pain and psychological and emotional anguish.”
“Her distress is made worse by the knowledge and realization that her body is permanently harmed and will never be what it could have been if Defendants had not committed wrongdoing and had instead allowed her body to develop naturally without their life-altering interventions,” her lawsuit states.
She is far from the only one affected in this way. Chloe Cole, who also attempted transition as a teenager, underwent a double mastectomy and had her breasts removed forever when she was only 15. Layla Jane was put on puberty blockers at age 12 and then underwent a double mastectomy when she was only 13 years old.
These girls continue to suffer from redistributed body fat; muscle growth and muscle atrophy; unwanted body hair; voice changes; cardiovascular issues; chronic, burning pain in their back and shoulders; and more. And perhaps worse than that: all of these girls, and many boys as well, have to live with the fact that they were lied to in the name of ideology, that their mental distress had been harnessed in the name of gender ideology, and that they had been victimized.
This victimization is amplified by the profit motives driving the transgender medical industry, which generates billions annually from lifelong hormone dependencies, surgeries, and follow-up care. Organizations like WPATH, which set the standards for “gender-affirming care,” are made up of members who derive their income from providing these interventions while simultaneously influencing the guidelines for care. Therapists and doctors frequently fast-track vulnerable youth, failing to address the very issues that drive that vulnerability, such as trauma, autism spectrum disorder, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other mental health comorbidities, in favor of pseudoscientific “gender-affirming care” involving administration of life-altering cross-sex hormones and/or surgeries that prioritize ideological affirmation over evidence-based treatment.
Many detransitioners have picked up their lives again, whether they have retreated from the public eye and entered into relationships and attempted to start families, or they have entered the public forum and advocate against gender ideology. Though their paths ahead may be different, they are grateful to have escaped the gender ideology cult.
But not everyone makes it.
Transgender activism is littered with dramatic rhetoric about death—”If your parents don’t support you, they hate you, and want you dead.” Even the main thesis of “gender affirming care” is attached to death, and the threat of suicide: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” Activist doctors insist to parents that if they don’t allow their child to begin hormones or undergo surgery, the child will ultimately commit suicide—and it will be the parents’ fault.
But in young Yaeli Martinez’s case, she took her own life at the age of nineteen after she began her long-awaited testosterone treatments.
Yaeli grew up in a California family with a troubled father who was not really part of her life. Yet she adored her father, and her sister described her as “Daddy’s little girl.” As a child, she loved princesses, dancing, and singing. But as she grew older, she struggled with mental health issues, using social media too much, to her mother’s concern. Yaeli began cutting herself, and at school, she befriended a female high schooler who would later identify as a transgender male named Caden. That friend, and the friend’s mother, reportedly pushed Yaeli to identify as transgender herself.
School officials affirmed Yaeli when she said she was a boy. They called her Andrew as she asked, and they used male pronouns when referring to her. When Abby, Yaeli’s mother, discovered this and pushed back, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) removed her daughter from her care.
And as Abby attempted to visit her daughter, who was in the care of the state, she was told that she couldn’t talk to her about God or beg her to reconsider her transition—or she wouldn’t be allowed to visit. The logic, Abby shared, was: if Yaeli was kept out of her family home, and away from anyone who convinced her that transitioning was wrong, she would have more of a chance to survive.
The California Department of Child and Family Services helped Yaeli get started taking cross-sex hormones, or testosterone, and she legally changed her name to Andrew. But she was still deeply depressed, and the testosterone was causing her physical pains. Her mother saw her situation, and, deeply emotional and frantic, she begged for her daughter to be given real medical treatment, not LGBTQ therapists or gender transition.
On September 4, 2019, Abby felt a pain in her chest. She felt uneasy, sad, anxious. She texted her daughter and anxiously waited for a reply. “I’m so glad you replied,” the mother told her daughter, “How are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m good, Mama,” Yaeli texted back, sharing a little about her day and her work. Then she stopped replying. Her mother hoped she was busy or had hopped in the shower. But it was the last text that she would ever receive from her daughter.
The next morning, as she drove home from dropping her son off at school, Abby received a phone call from the coroner’s office. “I need you to park the car,” she was told. And then she learned that her baby had taken her own life. Yaeli had lain down in front of a freight train, raised her arms above her head, and watched as the train hurtled towards her.
Officers cited in the coroner’s report said that the engineer saw her lying on the tracks and sounded the horn and set the emergency brakes, but it was too late. The coroner’s report describes in graphic detail how Yaeli’s body was scattered across the train tracks, a rib here, her torso there, a sneaker far off, the “blood smear” and “brain matter” all over the train and the tracks.
Abby was told not to see the body because there was not much left of her daughter to see.
The California Department of Child and Family Services, the very entity that had taken Abby’s daughter from her, put out a statement acknowledging Yaeli’s death. But they called the girl Andrew, and their statement expressed condolences to the “LGBTQIA community, which advocates relentlessly to protect its youngest and most vulnerable members from such tragedies.”
Abby has to live with that framing and with the knowledge that her daughter was taken from her before she had a chance to experience life, love, or real happiness. She knows that she is not the only parent to go through such a tragedy, and she won’t be the last. That’s why she shares her story, even though she is overwhelmed with sobs every time she tells it.
“I don’t want any parent to go through this,” she shared simply. “This pain never goes away.”