A woman who underwent so-called “gender-affirming” care when she was a minor and is suing her doctors and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for knowingly lying about the impact of the treatments appeared in a video to share her experience.
Isabelle Ayala, 20, a female detransitioner from Florida, told the Independent Women’s Forum that she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria after meeting with a doctor for only 45 minutes when she was 14. At her next appointment, she got on hormones.
Growing up, Ayala was a “girly-girl” but also liked toys like dinosaurs. She emphasized that she was heavily bullied as a child. At age seven, she began experiencing sexual abuse. When she turned 8, she was showing signs of starting puberty. Her mother took her to a doctor as a result. That visit, Ayala noted, “really cemented my hatred for my female body.”
At age 11, Ayala started using the internet and discovered what being transgender is.
“And of course, my young mind seeing that was like, ‘This is an option for me? I can disassociate myself from being female and just be a different person?’ And I was like, ‘This is it. This is going to fix me. Maybe I hate myself so much because I should have been born a boy,’” she said.
At age 14, Ayala moved to Rhode Island, which is where she sought out “gender-affirming” treatment. On the platform Tumblr, Ayala said she found “advice” on how to get approved for gender transition treatments. This included saying that she had attempted suicide and survived.
“While I was there, the doctors were very affirmative. They sat my parents down, were kind of like, pinned them to the wall, basically being like, ‘Hey, if you don’t affirm your child, your child is going to kill themselves,” she said.
When Ayala was approved for treatments, she was not given information about the long-term effects of taking hormones. As time went on, Ayala’s mental health worsened while on hormones, and at one point, her father walked in on her trying to hang herself.
At age 15, Ayala’s family moved back to Florida. She was sent a year’s worth of refills of her hormones.
“That in itself I think is malpractice,” she said. “I don’t think he [doctor] checked up on me at all.”
Ayala pointed out that in the trans community, there’s “a big shame in detransitioning.”
During the 2020 lockdowns, Ayala quit testosterone “cold turkey.”
“I still struggle a lot, mentally and physically,” Ayala said.
“I don’t even like to think about my fertility,” she added. “It is my greatest fear to go to the gynecologist and have them tell me that I can’t have children over some decisions that were made when I was 14.”
“Anyone with a heart will want to cry after watching Isabelle’s story of alleged mistreatment and abandonment by some of the most prominent experts in the field of ‘gender medicine.’ Sending children down this path is cruelty cloaked in kindness, and it’s long past time that those responsible face consequences. Isabelle is incredibly brave for taking on this fight by suing her providers and the AAP, and IWF is honored to tell her story," Kelsey Bolar, senior policy analyst at IWF and executive producer of the series, said in a statement to Townhall.
Detransitioner suing American Academy of Pediatrics: ‘I don’t want this to happen to other young girls’ https://t.co/0aPXIHv9od pic.twitter.com/JyDByej0Jx
— New York Post (@nypost) December 13, 2023
As Townhall previously reported, Ayala is suing the AAP and doctors at the Hasbro Children’s Hospital Gender Clinic who provided her experimental, detrimental transgender care. The organization has long pushed for the use of this kind of experimental care for minors. In 2018, Dr. Jason Rafferty, Ayala’s physician, and his colleagues published the AAP’s mission statement supporting “care of transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents.”
Ayala is not the only detransitioner to pursue legal action. Last year, Townhall covered how Chloe Cole, now 19, would suing the organizations and doctors who facilitated the irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries and treatments she endured as a minor. Cole underwent a double mastectomy when she was 15.
“My teenage life has been the culmination of excruciating pain, regret, and, most importantly, injustice,” Cole shared. “It is impossible for me to recoup what I have lost, but I will ensure no child will be harmed at the hands of these liars and mutilators. I am suing these monsters.”