In an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court sided with a licensed Colorado counselor who challenged a state law prohibiting counselors from helping gender-confused children explore alternatives to gender transition. The highest court in the country has once again forced this issue into the national spotlight.
While the case was, legally speaking, about free speech, for those of us on the other side of so-called “gender-affirming care,” it represents something we have been fighting for for years.
My name is Prisha Mosley, and I am a detransitioner, an advocate and a mother. I was medically harmed by my doctors as a teenager because I believed the lie that I was born in the wrong body. This belief, perpetuated by a culture of dishonesty, enabled my doctors to defraud and medically harm me.
At 16 years old, I had been struggling with an eating disorder and attempting to cope with trauma after a sexual assault. I was also introduced to the idea of transgenderism online. I was persuaded by the idea that all of my pain and suffering could be cured by transitioning to the opposite sex.
As a vulnerable minor, I was hopeful and desperate for a cure for my tendencies toward self-harm. When I brought these beliefs to my therapist, they were treated differently from my anorexic delusions. Instead of being told that my body was not the issue or that I needed to focus on my mental health and heal my trauma, my therapist told me that gender dysphoria was the actual cause of my suffering.
Soon after, I was placed on high doses of testosterone. Within a year, my healthy breasts were surgically removed.
Soon after detransitioning in late 2022, I started speaking out against the harms I experienced when I believed I was transgender. Through my advocacy, I came to meet many other detransitioners — young people who were all missing body parts and suffering the results of extreme endocrine disruption from wrong-sex hormones. Many of these individuals have become dear to me over the years.
Ultimately, all detransitioners were tricked into a mental health “treatment” that was a pseudoscientific scam that harmed our bodies and utterly failed to heal our traumas and distress.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Chiles v. Salazar is monumental. Our government cannot enforce ideological conformity or silence those who speak the truth about biological reality. Thanks to this ruling, no licensed counselor in our country is required to affirm only one direction of gender identity exploration.
One of the most devastating decisions you can make when you are suffering from gender dysphoria is to proceed with removing your body parts. Even if you choose to detransition later in life, there is no outcome that will get you even close to what you had in your original, healthy body. The truth of the matter is this: children cannot consent to this harm.
Children cannot grasp what it means to lose fertility. They cannot understand lifelong dependency on hormones. They cannot fully weigh the consequences of being unable to breastfeed their children, instead feeling completely numb.
Something I think about often is this: If I held my baby or if I set my chest on fire, it would feel like the same thing — nothing. If children cannot consent to getting a tattoo, how can they consent to the removal of their own body parts?
I am fighting for justice, not just for myself but also for my children. My doctors must be held accountable — they knew better when I did not. When I was a confused and hurting teenager, traumatized by sexual assault, I never thought I would want children when I was giving “informed consent.” My doctors violated my consent by lying to me and harming my body with anabolic steroids and a surgery I never needed.
As a result of the testosterone I was prescribed, I assumed I was infertile. When I was able to conceive, my pregnancy was very difficult and came with severe complications. At times, my doctors found themselves at a loss for what to do. It was difficult to be a medical experiment again, but this time there was honest communication about it.
Policies that encourage only one direction — affirmation without question — do not create freedom. They create an echo chamber of poor decisions and zero accountability. For vulnerable minors, that echo chamber dictates a path that is nearly impossible to reverse. No child deserves to be lied to, and the Supreme Court’s ruling serves as a major victory for common sense.