Yet another woman who was medically gender transitioned when she was a teenager is suing the doctors she says allowed her to masculinize her body.
A 23-year-old Chicago woman, who is filing her lawsuit anonymously, is suing the surgeons who she says cut off her healthy breasts and removed her uterus, making it impossible for her to ever carry and birth her biological children.
The woman filed her lawsuit Wednesday in Wisconsin’s Dane County Circuit Court. She had her gender surgeries at UW Health, the University of Wisconsin’s hospital in Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.
The lawsuit names the hospital as well as the two surgeons who allegedly operated on her.
Dr. Jay Lick performed a hysterectomy on the woman when she was 19, and Dr. Katherine Gast gave her a double mastectomy when she was 21, the lawsuit claims. The woman claims her self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria was not confirmed by a doctor before she was greenlighted for surgery.
Over the years, the woman has identified as a lesbian, she has considered identifying as transgender, and she has identified as non-binary in an attempt to “cleanse her of the severe psychological distress and trauma that she endured as a child,” the lawsuit states.
In the past year, she has been in therapy that helped her conclude it was her childhood trauma that caused her mental distress, not her physical features, the suit says, so she halted her testosterone treatment and started the process of “detransitioning.”
The woman, who is Jewish, now says she “mourns that she will never be able to naturally conceive a large family, as expected in her culture,” her lawsuit says.
She had a “series of traumatizing events within her childhood home, including being sexually abused,” the lawsuit says, and she was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The lawsuit accuses the surgeons of medical malpractice and failing to obtain informed consent, and it accuses the hospital of negligence. The suit accuses both the doctors and hospital of discrimination under the Affordable Care Act, saying the woman was denied care that would have been given to a “non-transgender woman.”
The hysterectomy came about because the woman saw Lick for uterine bleeding resulting from the testosterone she was taking, according to the suit. Lick suggested a hysterectomy without confirming her gender dysphoria or discussing the risks and later performed the surgery, “coding the procedure as gender-affirming,” the suit says.
UW Health has not commented on the specifics of the lawsuit.
“UW Health and its providers care deeply for the health and well-being of patients and work hard every day to ensure patients receive the best possible care,” UW Health spokesperson Sara Benzel said.
Earlier this month, another detransitioner, twenty-year-old Isabelle Ayala sued her doctors along with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), saying they sent her down the “path of ‘gender-affirming’ medicalization” when she was a teenager rather than addressing her mental health problems.