Cassie, 18, developed gender dysphoria after she was sexually assaulted
She said her therapist told her surgery was ‘the only way’ to fix her problems
The Maryland-native, who is now detransitioning, called it ‘medical malpractice’
Cassie has now begun to detransition, and will have to have a total of four more surgeries if she wants to fix her chest – but unfortunately, she was left with ‘permanent damage’ that she will never be able to undo.
She also said she was ‘abused by an intimate partner’ as a teen, which made her despise her body even more.
‘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],’ she explained.
‘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.’
Her parents decided to put her in therapy, but unfortunately, that only made things worse.
‘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.
She then started seeing a ‘gender affirming therapist’ who told her that ‘transitioning’ would be ‘the only solution to her gender dysphoria.’
‘It felt like I had been struggling for my whole life, and that this was the only way to fix it,’ she recalled.
Cassie said she ‘grasped onto’ an ‘explanation’ for how she was feeling, and at age 14, she went under the knife to have her breasts removed – but almost immediately, she knew she had made a ‘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 shared.
Cassie noted that to transition as a minor you need to have a letter from a therapist, which she said was given to her after her first visit.
She said she struggled to identify with other men, but didn’t fit in with women either.
‘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.’