“I believed it was a woman’s place to be sexually harmed by men, that it was natural,” Prisha Mosley told The Washington Post. Mosley was just 14 when a man sexually assaulted her. 

The rape resulted in a pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage. An already broken girl began to struggle with intense anorexia, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The body into which she was born became like an iron maiden, a box spiked with nails that constantly pierced her psyche from all directions. 

Then, one day, she was introduced to a panacea, the thing that would, like spring rain, wash away all her heartache and pain. Mosley was encouraged to medically transition from a girl to a boy. It offered the possibility of escaping the womanhood that she had come to associate with bottomless suffering. In so-called gender-affirming care, Mosley saw hope glimmering on the horizon. 

But her sexual transition ultimately made everything worse. Mosley’s daily life became a waking nightmare. Now her psychological scars would be accompanied by physical ones. They would serve as reminders that when she was lost and in need of help, Mosley was led into treacherous shoals by the siren song of transgenderism, irreversibly damaging her body in the process.

Last summer, Mosley announced that she was suing the medical practitioners and clinics that took her down this primrose path. She is one of a growing number of “detransitioners” seeking legal restitution from those who failed to uphold the Hippocratic oath and “do no harm.” The lawsuits come at a time when more and more data emerge to confirm the obvious: gender reassignment treatments are morally dangerous and scientifically unsound, as Mosley’s case illustrates. Though each detransitioner has a horror story, Mosley’s is particularly hellish.

The year after her sexual assault, Mosley was hospitalized for depression at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital in North Carolina. Physician notes in the filing indicate that Mosley was actively trying to destroy her body both indirectly, through self-induced vomiting and cutting, and directly, via “suicidal attempts.” As her mental and physical health deteriorated, Mosley was egged on through social media to engage in anorexic behavior and starve herself. It was also around this time that people online put it in her head that physically transitioning could free her from the suffering she had come to know as a female. All this was happening unbeknownst to Mosley’s parents, hidden from view in strange online communities.

The lawsuit states that by the time she was 16, Mosley had been formally diagnosed with major depressive, obsessive-compulsive, and eating disorders. Her daily cocktail of drugs included several antidepressants and Quetiapine, a powerful antipsychotic. But it wasn’t strong enough. A nasty episode of self-harm put her in the hospital’s emergency room in January 2015.

Mosley was seen at Cone Health’s Tim and Carolynn Rice Center for Child and Adolescent Health a few days after she was discharged from emergency care. It was there, during a brief evaluation, that a medical resident under the supervision of one of the defendants in Mosley’s lawsuit concluded that “gender identity crisis” was “most likely the underlying issue that drives her eating disorder and emotional distress.” The filing states that the supervising doctor “validated gender dysphoria and discussed pursuing resources” while noting Mosley’s “continued anxiety and possibility of making medication changes.”

In other words, despite a documented history of sexual assault, mental health issues, and anorexia encouraged by social media, Mosley’s medical providers concluded that her real problem was that she had been born female rather than male, which in turn reinforced her negative conception of womanhood. When Mosley’s parents voiced concerns about the diagnosis, her doctor highlighted “the importance of validating her symptoms, particularly the gender dysphoria.” 

A month after Mosley’s initial meeting about “gender dysphoria,” a resident at the Tim and Carolynn Rice Center administered a hormone shot to stop her from having periods as part of the first step in transitioning. Medical notes cited in the lawsuit state, “Depo shot given, Mom not aware,” indicating that Mosley’s parents were kept in the dark as their daughter—then a minor—embarked on her radical transformation. Other notes from her providers paint a portrait of deliberate deception. In one of them, Mosley’s doctor says that it would be “illegal for [Prisha’s] parents to stop [her] from getting sexual medical help.”

In the months and years that followed, Mosley’s mental health continued to spiral as each medical practitioner she encountered urged her to stay on the road toward transitioning. Every red flag was ignored or downplayed. Her parents became obstacles to overcome and were excised by the medical experts, the only people Mosley thought she could trust. The testosterone they gave her caused vaginal atrophy and changed her voice so that she could no longer sing with a feminine sound. Her chest aches where her breasts used to be following a double mastectomy. 

After being disillusioned, Mosley decided to detransition last fall. It had all been a lie. “I just took the cure that was handed to me,” she told the Post through tears. 

I just don’t want anyone else to feel this way. I lost my voice. I lost my chest. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to have kids. I feel like no one wants to date me or love me because I’m ruined.

Mosley said she did not realize the extent to which she had been deceived until very recently, and now righteous indignation seems to have replaced sorrow. The timing could not be better for action. Virtually every lie that has led to the normalization of “gender-affirming care” for minors is being upended. 

It’s long been claimed, for example, that the effects of puberty blockers are reversible, as if man could, with impunity, manipulate nature with the same ease he would a light switch. But a new study published this year by Mayo Clinic researchers found that these drugs can, in fact, have long-term consequences. The team found “unprecedented histological evidence revealing detrimental pediatric testicular sex gland responses to [puberty blockers],” including infertility and cancer in males. Even The New York Times has been forced to concede that the effects of blockers can’t be easily undone. 

In a lengthy investigative story on the subject, the paper mentioned an unnamed teen on blockers whose spinal bone density plummeted to osteoporotic levels. Another teen in Sweden who used blockers starting at the age of 11 developed osteoporosis and is permanently disabled with chronic back pain after suffering a compression fracture in his spine. Temporary and reversible, these things are not. 

What about the alleged psychological benefits of putting minors on blockers? A new study across the pond has thrown cold water on that, too. In September, an analysis produced by the Gender Identity Development Service in the United Kingdom found that a third of young people who identify as transgender and received puberty blockers actually saw their mental health deteriorate. The study
overturned previous findings suggesting blockers were more or less harmless. This reanalysis was part of a body of evidence contradicting the earlier consensus about gender transitions and has caused the United Kingdom to roll back access to “gender-affirming care” for children.

The real danger of puberty blockers is that they often act as transition accelerators. Children who use them are much more likely, as happened in Mosley’s case, to proceed to other stages of the process. That is especially pernicious when we consider that, according to a landmark study in the Netherlands, most children grow out of their desire to seek “gender-affirming care.” That study, published in February, followed a group of 2,700 children for 15 years, beginning at age 11. By age 25, just 4 percent said they “often” or “sometimes” felt unhappy with their gender. That was down from 11 percent who expressed “gender non-contentedness” at the outset.

“The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common,” the researchers concluded. That advice might have saved people like Mosley a lifetime of hurt. 

But perhaps the best indicator that the tide of transgenderism is beginning to turn is the fact that young people are taking matters into their own hands. They aren’t necessarily conservatives in the conventional sense. Mosley does not call herself that, although she has joined forces with some conservative activists. I doubt the hundreds of high school students who walked out of class to protest transgender bathroom policies in Pennsylvania’s Perkiomen Valley School District were one and all politically conservative. Similar protests happened at Woodgrove High School in Virginia and Elida High School in Ohio. 

This cultural rebellion of today’s youth seems to have less to do with kids getting a steady diet of Fox News than it does with the proclivity of young people to rage against the status quo, which right now is one where transgender ideology has been imposed on them from the top down. The adults in the room have failed them like they failed Mosley and countless other kids.

Is this counterreaction from young people too little, too late? To some degree, it seems that way. Gender ideology is now so entrenched in our institutions, from medical schools to associations. There is also the fact that there are those who, like Mosley, seem already to have reached the point of no return—the damage is done. So it’s natural to be torn between cautious optimism and deep pessimism.

Having said that, I learned in February that against all the odds, Mosley revealed that she was pregnant. After years of having every reason to believe transitioning had rendered her infertile, she felt the first heartbeat of her unborn son. 

Mosley will not be able to breastfeed her boy. The changes to her body wrought by “gender-affirming care” will make a cesarean delivery the only option and complicate her pregnancy in a variety of other ways. But she is making the best of it; her child has a chance. And that is all we can hope for. A chance to turn this around against the odds. ◆