On a cold, windy winter morning earlier this month, Americans rallied in front of the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices heard a landmark case about a state’s right to protect minors from harmful “gender transition” drugs and surgeries.
Doctors, parents, senators, and legal professionals, including ADF’s Matt Sharp and Rachel Rouleau, shared the dangers of these procedures and emphasized the need for these laws.
Several young women also shared their firsthand experiences of pain, trauma, and suffering caused by the recklessness of the medical professionals and others who foisted this ideology upon them. One of those women is 27-year-old Laura Becker, with whom ADF had the opportunity to speak at the rally.
‘I was a ripe target for gender ideology’
Throughout her adolescence, Laura struggled with a variety of medical issues and mental health challenges. She was diagnosed with autism and suffered from depression, and she endured psychological and emotional abuse from her father.
In her teenage years, her depression worsened and she self-medicated with drugs.
Speaking with ADF, Laura said her struggles and years of being a patient in the medical system made her “a ripe target for gender ideology.”
At 19, while she wrestled with her sex and identity, a college professor who identified as transgender recommended that Laura take testosterone. Clinicians prescribed her a high dose. Laura’s health challenges worsened, and she had a mental breakdown.
Still, the response of clinicians and doctors was to affirm her so-called “trans” identity and push her toward more extreme drugs and procedures, despite her deteriorating mental state. When Laura was 20, doctors performed a double mastectomy, even though she expressed suicidal thoughts on the day of the surgery.
Those thoughts persisted for years. Eventually, Laura sought help and ultimately detransitioned, but she still lives with the trauma and lifelong effects of a permanently altered body.
“I will never have breasts. I will never have a normal female body. I will never breastfeed. … So that’s a devastating grief that I live with every time I look in the mirror,” she told ADF. “My voice is permanently lowered. I grow facial fair. And I have PTSD from the transition, from the identity crisis and being disassociated from my body for, like, four years.”
She hopes other children and teenagers struggling with their identities are instead encouraged to embrace their bodies just as they were designed.
“I wish young people knew that puberty isn’t a disease, that growing up is necessary for happiness, that taking responsibility for the natural constraints of your body,” she shared with ADF. “Trying to be the opposite sex just isn’t going to work. You have to work within the limitations of reality, and accepting reality has been the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Gender ideology harms, not helps
Now, more than six years after her surgery, Laura says she loves being a woman.
Laura wishes that the adults around her would have recognized the deeper issues she was working through instead of taking an “affirming” approach to her identity struggles.
“That’s the whole, you know, tragedy of my story, is that there were so many things going wrong, and no one protected me,” she said. “No one saw the truth.”
Instead, doctors rushed to prescribe her hormones that did not belong in her body. They were quick to remove her healthy body parts—even when she was not in the mental state to consent to such a drastic, irreversible procedure.
The law in question before the Supreme Court recognizes that vulnerable children deserve to be protected from these experimental drugs and surgeries. Twenty-five other states have similar laws on the books—including Alabama and Idaho, both of which ADF is currently representing against activists’ challenges to their laws.
A growing number of detransitioners like Laura are raising their voices in support of these laws protecting children, exposing the dangers of so-called gender transition.
Importantly, science is on the side of detransitioners. Research continues to show that children can suffer serious, lifelong physical, mental, and emotional damage as a result of these experimental medical interventions. Much of the supposed “evidence” to the contrary has been revealed to be based on dubious science and, in many instances, politically motivated.
The stories of young women like Laura must not be ignored, and their calls to shield children who may be targets of this ideology should be heeded. They know what they’re talking about.
Children deserve better than faulty science and an agenda-driven medical system. They deserve the truth. And they need adults to protect them when cultural lies and bad actors threaten their minds and bodies.
