Detransitioners press SCOTUS to uphold state ban on youth trans medicine: 'infertile' for no reason

Weeks before the Supreme Court evaluates Tennessee's ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions for gender-confused youth, more than a dozen formerly transgender youth and the mother of a girl who killed herself after a gender transition are sharing their and their families' transition regrets and consequences in friend-of-the-court briefs.

Prominent detransitioners on the brief include Chloe Cole and Luka Hein, each suing providers who performed their transition; Maia Poet, who fled her parents in the U.S. to live as a man in Israel and escaped the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack through a "last-minute change in plans"; and Abel Garcia, who led outreach to Spanish-speaking physicians on behalf of the gender-critical Alliance for Mental Health at the recent Academy of American Pediatrics conference.

AAP booted Cole, Garcia and other detransitioners from their conference booth and reject a "virtual pass" to the event held by Nikki Johnson, director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism's medical project. 

FAIR reportedly ruffled feathers at its AAP booth last year with Cole and St. Louis pediatric gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed.

The signatories on the brief say they were recruited through "individual citizens coming together and using their network to organize and sign" and "living proof of how gender affirming care harmed them" and that other signatories are "risking their professional reputation" as physicians, psychologists, healthcare professionals and public officials to support them.

More than 80 outside briefs have engulfed the high court since it accepted the case in June.

The first batch was dominated by mainstream medical, legal and activist opponents of Tennessee's ban, known as SB 1, as well as Democratic states, transgender actor Elliot Page of "Juno" fame, former GOP lawmakers and staffers who called the law an attack on parental rights, and transgender clinical psychologist Erica Anderson, who also opposes social transitions without parental involvement.

The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine filed in support of neither party amid the spree against Tennessee, warning the high court that minor transitions started only because "gender transition in adults failed to yield the intended positive outcomes" and distinguishing the American craze for youth medical transitions from the sharp European reversal.

"Every aspect of the practice – from the diagnosis, which is unable to differentiate those who may be helped by treatment from those who will be harmed, to the highly invasive interventions themselves, which cause certain harms, such as sterility, while producing only uncertain benefits – challenges the conventions of evidence-based medicine," SEGM said.

In the same vein, the lead researcher behind a federally funded 2015 study of children taking puberty blockers admitted to The New York Times last week that she didn't publish the results because they didn't show mental health improvements and "I do not want our work to be weaponized" by opponents of treatment.

Children's Hospital Los Angeles pediatrician Johanna Olson-Kennedy tried to explain the findings by claiming the 95 adolescents were "in really good shape when they come in," contradicting her own description of the group in 2020, which said a quarter were depressed or suicidal before joining the study.

This month, Tennessee's supporters came out in full force, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, lawmakers from 23 states with similar laws, the Florida House, a dozen GOP governors, gender-critical feminist Women's Liberation Front and Women's Declaration International, and nonprofits from 14 countries that help gender-confused kids and their families.

"The Larger Detransitioners Community Amicus Team" answered a Just the News query on the structure and composition of the brief, whose "primary author and organizer" is bioethics lawyer Diana Lufti but which was filed by New Mexico lawyer Terry Lee Fowler. Lufti called Fowler her "former academic mentor" who legally adopted her when she was a law student.

It's representing the entire appendix list "for the sole purpose" of the brief and some "directly contributed" by writing sections – Poet is credited as one of them – being interviewed or sharing narratives, or "financially supporting" it, and "at least six detransitioners/desisters are using their preferred names or pseudonyms," the unidentified person wrote in an email.

Detransitioner "Brendan D" said he begged his provider to remove his "Histrelin implant," which he believes played a role in his inability to orgasm "for at least seven months" after transitioning. The provider didn't tell him beforehand he faced a "high risk" the implant "could break apart in my body," then assigned a medical student to remove it, he said.

"I resent the fact I’m infertile over a completely avoidable medical treatment," Brendan wrote. "I feel like they saw I was a gender nonconforming and effeminate boy and that they thought they could mold me into something I wasn’t."

Seth Wolverton said he was "a teenage boy with no personal autonomy living in a small town in Pennsylvania where I was treated badly for being feminine, gay, and different."

Jade Martin described experiencing "persistent throat pain, continued chest atrophy, recurring ovarian cysts which resulted in emergency room visits, and the need to have her gallbladder removed as a complication of her detransition."

An unidentified detransitioner said he was "pressured by his psychiatrist to accept a gender identity, and it was the only means by which he was able to leave the psychiatric facility."

They were "informed that medically transitioning was their only option for treating gender dysphoria and were ushered into the process without safeguards because medical transitioning is the 'standard of care,'" yet they have no recourse "because the physiological changes were intended by the patient," the detransitioner-led brief says.

If the justices strike down SB 1 under the 14th Amendment equal protection clause as sought by the Biden administration and transgender adolescents represented by the ACLU, detransitioners' chances of prevailing against their providers in current and future litigation – something that none has yet achieved – "would diminish," they said.

The brief also includes Gays Against Groomers, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender – most of whose members go by pseudonyms because of "family situations and jobs" – and the University of California Berkeley Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases Director Julia Schaletzky, a critic of "identity biographies" in research.

Its biggest name is Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who first rose to prominence in 2016 for refusing to use preferred pronouns at the University of Toronto and lost a legal battle this year to keep his professional license without undergoing so-called remedial trainings for his public statements, which pose "moderate risks of harm to the public.”

First Liberty Institute's brief on behalf of Abigail Martinez shares the Salvadoran immigrant's "tragic story" of her late daughter Yaeli's public school and then California Department of Child and Family Services encouraging "Andrew" to transition, giving her cross-sex hormones but not mental health treatment and removing her but not her siblings from her mother's home.

Two months after the state cleared Martinez of abuse charges, Yaeli laid down in front of a train, "a death so gruesome that the funeral home was not able to show her body" to her mother, according to the brief. 

"This pain doesn’t have a beginning or an end," Martinez said.

The Biden administration makes a mockery of parental rights by claiming to defend them, the brief says. "The First Amendment enshrines the right to raise children according to the parent’s religious beliefs" and SB 1 protects those rights so the state can't punish non-affirming parents.

As did Martinez, Hein said her providers neglected "so many other severe things going on in my life" once she mentioned "the trans thing" and made it "the source of all my other issues."

"Some parents may want their child to trans-identify and may psychologically condition their child to be transgendered," the detransitioner-led brief says, citing a Fordham University dissertation from 2000 and an uncredited signatory who said "my mother told me I was meant to be a boy and how horrible it was to be female."

It noted Bay Area public media station KQED reported in 2018 that some transgender researchers believe children know as early as 3 years old whether they identify as the opposite sex.

Just the News aired a TV special this month with a Florida mom who spoke alongside Martinez at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, as parents whose children's schools socially transitioned them covertly and with the lead for a searchable database exposing $120 million in insurance claims for so-called gender affirming care on 14,000 children.

The only way to defeat gender ideology, which has "permeated into every aspect of our culture, including my field of psychology," is to "to fully inoculate children" by teaching them "to stand firm in the truth and that we do not lie to those that we love," January Littlejohn said. A ruling from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in her lawsuit against the school is pending.

Do No Harm's Michelle Havrilla, director of programs against youth gender ideology, said fellow concerned nurses have "strength in numbers" and the database gives them the evidence that youth medical transitions are "not some fringe, small idea" but a routine practice nationwide.