Woman who got a mastectomy at age 14 slams therapist for talking her into transition surgery

A detransitioning woman who reportedly underwent a mastectomy at age 14 has slammed her healthcare providers for steering her the wrong way.

According to the now-18-year-old detransitioner, who goes only by her first name Cassie, the problems for her started after she was sexually assaulted and “groomed” by someone she met “online” at the age of 10.

“That’s when I found out what being transgender was from the internet, and I started privately, internally identifying that way,” she said during an appearance earlier this month on the “We’re All Insane” podcast.

She also came to hate her developing breasts.

“I started developing my chest when I was probably about seven or eight years old. And my first memory of that was standing in the shower with my hands like this, trying to push it back in [and] stop it from growing. It was always something I hated. I would layer sports bras on sports bras to try and flatten it,” she said.

Combined, the abuse and the insecurity were too much for her.

“A big part of what led me to feeling the gender dysphoria in the first place was being sexually abused, and my breasts were sort of a focus of that [abuse]. Right when I was transitioning from girlhood to womanhood, I was shown that being a woman is to be objectified and to be in pain. And I didn’t want that,” she explained.

And so in 6th grade, she began identifying as transgender and using he/him pronouns. Meanwhile, she started self-harming and even tried to cut off her breasts using a knife. All this resulted in her parents hiring a therapist for her. Yet that did little to help.

“When I came out to my therapist about being trans, she told me I should find God and that would heal me and I wouldn’t feel that way anymore,” she recalled.

That didn’t go so swell, and so she switched to a “gender affirming” therapist who told her that “transitioning” was the “only solution” to her issues. Sadly, she bought this narrative hook, line, and sinker.

“It felt like I had been struggling for my whole life, and that this was the only way to fix it. But I can look back now and see it was a whole mess of other issues. It was an eating disorder, my autism and not liking change, a whole lot of stuff,” she said.

“At the time, [the therapist] was telling me, ‘You have this. This is the only way to fix it.’ So what else was I gonna do?” she added.

At age 14, she finally pulled the trigger and got a mastectomy. But soon after, she realized she’d made a massive “mistake.”

“When they took the bandages off I started crying. My family and my surgeon all thought it was happy tears but it wasn’t. It was regret. I knew I had hurt myself in the long run,” she recalled.

Looking back, she says it was “medical malpractice” for her healthcare providers to rush her into a transition.

“My top surgery consultation was 15 minutes long, and they’re usually supposed to be like an hour. I wasn’t told anything about the actual consequences of the surgery. I wasn’t told about the nerve pain. I wasn’t told that I’d never be able to breastfeed or experience sensation in my chest again,” she said.

“I think what happened to me was medical malpractice. It wasn’t wrong because I was young or because I wasn’t really trans or that I would regret it later. It was wrong because I wasn’t properly informed of the decision I was making. You’re removing body parts. Obviously, there’s going to be consequences, but I wasn’t properly informed of those consequences and I should have been,” she added.

All she needed to transition was a letter from her therapist — that’s it.

“I made this decision when I was [so young]. There were doctors and therapists who were meant to determine if this was the right thing for me, and they were wrong. The point of having to get the letter and the therapy before you’re allowed to do these things is so you can be properly evaluated to ensure this is the right thing for you,” she said.

“Giving it out in one appointment is irresponsible. It negates the point of the letter to begin with. My therapist was a gender affirming therapist. She didn’t even question if I was really trans or if this was the right thing for me. I basically came in with these self-diagnosed feelings about myself: I have gender dysphoria, I’m trans, I want this and I need a letter for it — and she just accepted all that and took it all at face value.”

Following her transition, she faced an array of new problems, including fitting in among other boys/men.

“I started to realize how men talk about women behind closed doors, and that was really scary. I think that’s probably why I realized I couldn’t be a man. Even when I was rejecting the labels ‘woman’ and ‘female’ and such, I knew when men were talking about women, they were talking about me,” she explained.

“I didn’t want to be attacked for being a woman anymore, so I became a man. But being a man didn’t protect me from being abused either. I still got abused. Actually, being trans made a lot of things even harder. There was just so much pain,” she added.

And confusion. For example, she didn’t know which public restroom to use — men’s or women’s — and so she contracted chronic UTI issues.

“I stopped using all public bathrooms after that. I looked and sounded like a male, but I would have to hear that stuff in the men’s bathroom [that made me uncomfortable],” she said.

“But I would likely be attacked if I went in the women’s bathroom. I developed chronic UTI issues. I can’t fully empty my bladder now due to the damage done to the muscles,” she added.

Not until three years after surgery, when she was 17, did she finally begin the process of detransitioning. She must now reportedly undergo four procedures to reverse the mastectomy, though even with that, her body will never be the same.

“I lost organs. Even if I get those four surgeries, they removed organs that I’ll never get back. I’ll never be able to breastfeed my children. I was 14 when I had my surgery, so I’ll never know what it feels like to be touched by a partner and that’s sad,” she said.

Vivek Saxena

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