Planned Parenthood was founded a century ago to promote birth control. Today, its nearly 600 clinics nationwide make it the largest single provider of abortion, contraception, reproductive care, and sex education in the U.S. It has also, in less than a decade, become the country’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data.
Hineman, who went from identifying as “nonbinary” to “agender” to “trans” over the course of a year, now considers herself a “detransitioner”—someone who, if possible, has returned to living as their birth sex, often with medical side effects.
Today, reported exclusively in The Free Press, she is a plaintiff in the first detransitioner lawsuit against Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In the medical malpractice suit, filed in April, she’s seeking unspecified damages for negligence and failure to obtain informed consent from all the health providers—including those at Planned Parenthood—who facilitated her medical transition: from therapists who “encouraged” her desire to change genders, to the plastic surgeon who removed her breasts after a superficial consult when she turned 19, to the nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood who wrote Hineman the prescription for testosterone. (In June, Planned Parenthood filed its answer to the complaint, disputing Hineman’s claims.)
She joins more than a dozen young people who, in separate lawsuits across the country, are alleging medical malpractice by institutions such as Kaiser Permanente as well as individual practitioners, and are seeking compensation for the harm they claim has been done to them.
Her suit comes as the U.S. is increasingly alone in championing hormonal and surgical interventions to swiftly transition gender-distressed young people. A growing list of European countries, including Sweden, Finland, and the UK, are restricting these sometimes irreversible treatments for young people and favoring an approach that encourages therapy to address all the causes of a patient’s distress.
In response, about two dozen Republican-led states have passed laws restricting this treatment for minors.
Trading one biological sex hormone for the other has a multitude of profound impacts: on metabolism, on risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, on bone health, on mood stability, on cognition, and on sexual function and fertility. Female sex organs thrive on estrogen, which the ovaries cease to produce under the sway of testosterone. After a few years, atrophy may affect the entire reproductive tract.
Planned Parenthood’s materials for clinicians state atrophy can begin within just 3–6 months of exposure. But on the brief patient consent form—it’s about three pages long—that both Hineman and Anna signed, this was referred to only as “genital dryness.”
Dr. Nicole Chaisson said that side effects are part of the conversation, but acknowledged that some may go unmentioned, saying it would be wrong to point patients to things that might happen 10 or 20 years down the road when “they’re having lifesaving care right now.”
Chaisson is referring to a claim often repeated by gender practitioners: that without access to “affirming” treatments, young people will commit suicide. This is a threat that’s been commonly held over parents reluctant to approve transition for their child.
Fortunately, there is now good evidence to refute this dire claim. Researchers in Finland recently published the largest study to date looking at suicide in gender-distressed patients and found that suicide is rare, and the greatest predictor of it is previously diagnosed psychiatric conditions.
Hineman now regrets that she put off college to transition, and spent her life savings, about $9,000, on a mastectomy. She has gone public because she wants young people like herself, their parents, and the providers who are pushing ideology over good care to know that there are safe and humane ways to address the kind of distress she suffered. “The answers are not just transition or suicide. There are ways to work through these feelings without altering your body,” she says.
As for Planned Parenthood, she says, “Honestly, I want them to focus on women’s health. That’s what they exist for.”