A US detransitioner says medics rushed her into irreversible surgery after she self-diagnosed gender dysphoria.
In a confidential lawsuit, the 23-year-old woman alleges surgeons at the University of Wisconsin Hospital (UWH) performed a hysterectomy in 2019 and a double mastectomy in 2021 without her informed consent.
But in April, the US Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, Rachel Levine – a man who lives as a woman – claimed any opposition to ‘gender-affirming care’ is “ideologically and politically motivated”.
Trans-affirming
As a consequence of traumatising events in her childhood, the patient was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In her late teens she came to believe that she was a man trapped in a woman’s body, decided that she had gender dysphoria and, without a formal diagnosis, was prescribed cross-sex hormones.
Following a consultation with UWH’s Dr Jay Lick in 2019 over complications caused by the sex-swap drugs, she alleges he carried out a hysterectomy without verifying her gender dysphoria.
Two years later, the hospital’s Dr Katherine Gast removed her healthy breasts, again – according to the lawsuit – without challenging her self-reported gender dysphoria or exploring her mental health problems.
Reckless
The suit states the patient questions why the surgeons “so strongly and quickly ushered her down the path of irreversible surgical interventions, without ever even considering a psychological intervention”.
It argues that the doctors “recklessly, if not intentionally, overlooked or ignored her psychological history to justify their approach to treating her, a young woman confused about her gender identity and experiencing current and known mental distress”.
The court document reveals the young woman “mourns that she will never be able to naturally conceive a large family”.
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