Detransitioned woman tells Texas lawmakers no parent has the right to 'mutilate and sterilize their child' as state weighs ban on child sex changes

A detransitioned young woman from Michigan testified before a Texas Senate Health Committee Thursday about the harm gender-affirming healthcare providers did to her when she was a mentally ill child convinced that she was transgender.

Prisha Mosley told the Texas Senate Health Committee holding a hearing for SB 14 that she was just 15-years-old when the transgender community found her and convinced her that she had been born in the wrong body.

Mosley said at the time she had already been diagnosed with multiple psychiatric disorders, including anorexia, borderline personality disorder, and trauma disorder. She said members of the transgender community, and her gender-affirming therapist, told her that undergoing a medical sex change would cure her.

“As an impressionable child, I fully believed this,” said Mosley. “I also believed that my sexual assault which happened at age 14, only happens to girls. I wanted to transition to be safe.”

Beginning at age 17, high doses of testosterone were injected into her anorexic body, at the same hospital where she was receiving care for her eating disorder and where she regularly received stitches for cutting and other self-harm behaviours.

“What I don’t understand is why they never offered me counseling, to help me with the depression, the trauma, the personality disorder, or my ongoing self harm.”

Mosley told the committee that she was pushed into transition while all her co-existing mental health issues were ignored, and gave a detailed account of the ongoing side effects of the powerful male hormone she was given while going through a serious mental health crisis.

The young woman said the testosterone caused hair growth all over her body, and hair loss on her head. Her shoulders broadened rapidly, making her disproportionate, clumsy and in constant pain.

“My neck, back, and shoulders constantly burn and all my joints ache all the time,” she told the assembled committee.

Mosley also described the permanent changes to her voice and said her endocrine system is “ruined” and she is no longer able to regulate her own hormones.

But one of the worst side effects for Mosley is vaginal atrophy, defined as the shrinking and thinning of the vagina. She said this is so severe that she is not even able to use tampons because her vagina is so small and she is afraid she will tear, which she says has already happened.

In her bombshell whistleblower article about the Washington University Transgender Center, Jamie Reed, a former case worker at the gender clinic, told of a teenage girl who was admitted to the ER bleeding profusely from severe vaginal lacerations. Reed alleges that this girl’s vagina had atrophied due to the testosterone she had been prescribed by the gender clinic.

“One year after starting wrong-sex hormones, despite persistent self harm, my healthy breasts were removed,” Mosley told the committee, adding that her chest is still numb and she lost parts of her nipples when pieces stuck to her bandaging.

SB 14 seeks to ban healthcare professionals from performing experimental sex change interventions on minors. The bill, proposed by Senator Donna Campbell, would mean doctors risk losing their license if they prescribe what is known in the medical community as "gender affirming care" in the form of drugs or surgery.

“They told me no to liposuction and yes to a radical mastectomy,” said the young woman. “I was too unhealthy to consent to lips, but not to top surgery.”

Mosley said trusting her doctors and the transgender community led to her standing before the committee in an aching body that is no longer hers. Her severe medical issues, caused by gender-affirming healthcare, are not currently covered by insurance the way her medical sex change was covered, and no doctor is willing to treat her.

“The medical professionals who did this to me have abandoned me, and the trans community, has abandoned me. Doctors assisted me in mutilating myself and then left me in the cold when I wanted the harm to stop.”

She concluded by saying that the damage done to her body can never be fully reversed, but that seeing young girls in the same position she was in, suffering from mental illness and body dysmorphia who feel pressured by peers and social media to conform to certain stereotypes of femininity, her heart breaks for them and she feels compelled to advocate on their behalf.

Senator Campbell then asked Mosley what prompted her to detransition, and Mosley replied that receiving therapy for her co-existing mental health issues provided the healing that was promised to her with medical transition.

Michelle Zacchigna, the Ontario woman who has launched Canada’s first detransition malpractice lawsuit, tells a similar story of believing that a medical sex change would solve all her mental health problems only to discover too late that transition was not the answer. She too made the decision to detransition when she realised that her multiple mental health diagnoses explained her distress far better than the idea that she was transgender.

When Senator José Menéndez asked Mosley what her parents thought about her decision to medically transition, she explained that they were strongly against it but were emotionally blackmailed into consenting by the gender-affirming therapist she had found online, who told her parents she would commit suicide if they didn't got along with it.

“I remember my gender therapist looking them in the eyes and asking, ‘would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son? Do you want to pick up her hormones or her body from the morgue?”

Menéndez ended his questioning of Mosley by saying he feared that SB 14 was going to take the power to decide away from parents and their children and could result in young people experiencing the same level of regret that Mosley now has to live with.

“I don’t believe any parent has the right to mutilate and sterilize their child,” was Mosley’s response.