Harmed by “care”

ELLE PALMER: I mean puberty is hard, especially for girls.

JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON: Elle Palmer is a female…but her journey to adulthood took a detour during puberty.

PALMER: I was anxious. I stopped going to school before elementary school even ended. And I dropped out of school for three years. 

Palmer spent her time online, where she was groomed by transgender influencers.

PALMER: I experienced like having no friends in real life when I was transitioning and then cutting off whoever I knew before I transitioned because I didn't want anybody in my life who knew me as my old self.

When she finally returned to school three years later, Palmer came back as a boy. But about three years after that, she realized it was a mistake.

PALMER: A lot of people just think that everyone who transitions is very happy and it's kind of the right thing for everyone. And if you know yourself, then you'll be happy. But the problem with teenagers is that you don't know yourself. You're trying to figure out who you are.

She returned to living as a woman at age 19…though with permanent damage to her body. She’s not alone. Claire Abernathy was 14 when doctors began medical procedures to change her body.

CLAIRE ABERNATHY: There was eight months between being referred for gender therapy and getting my breasts removed. That's crazy.

Abernathy started calling herself transgender when she was 10 years old. By age 12, she suppressed her menstrual cycle with birth control pills. Two years later, doctors put her on testosterone and performed an irreversible double mastectomy.

ABERNATHY: I've been detransitioning for about three years and I've just now sort of come to the conclusion that this is all wrong and I've just now started listening to other detransitioners, and accepting sort of how bad what happened to me was.

Abernathy and Palmer hope the legal battle unfolding at the Supreme Court will make the stories of detransitioners more visible to the public. And it’s not just children who are harmed by these procedures. Some parents say they’ve been blindsided by medical interventions.

RYAN CLARKE: This all happened behind my back. I had no idea until it had already happened.

Ryan Clarke is a divorced father of two from Rochester, New York. During the custody battle, his daughter received her first injection of the puberty blocking medication Lupron when she was 11 after Clarke’s ex-wife signed off on the injection.

He says he’s tried to understand why doctors, therapists, and the courts won’t let him make medical decisions for his children.

CLARK: I've kind of reached a point in my court case where everything's impossible. I don't expect my relationship with my kids to kind of be repaired. However, this needs to stop for all kids you know and if my story can be a catalyst to help stop again for all kids then I'm gonna tell it until I’m blue in the face.

January Littlejohn says she too was blindsided when her 13 year old daughter began identifying as transgender.

JANUARY LITTLEJOHN: And this was after three of her friends at the local middle school also started suddenly identifying as transgender. My daughter had no previous confusion up into this announcement and so it really thrust my husband and I into this world that we were completely unaware of.

Littlejohn’s daughter eventually desisted and is now living without gender confusion. She hopes the Supreme Court will rule in Tennessee’s favor and uphold the state laws protecting children from transgender treatments. But more importantly, Littlejohn says there’s a safer way to help children work through their distress.

LITTLEJOHN: The truth is, the vast majority of these children will resolve their distress if they are not affirmed in a false identity or medically or socially transition. And so I would encourage parents to do your research.

But even doing research is complicated by the fact that many respected medical organizations still promote so-called gender affirming care.

SOMIL VIRADIA: …Unless you actually fix this from a medical perspective, unless the medical field admits that what they're doing is not only completely insane, it's anti-science, it's anti-ethical, this is not really like an actual return to sanity.

Somil Viradia is a doctor in California trained in family medicine. He says he was alarmed by what was happening in his profession…and he hopes the medical field owns up to its mistakes.

VIRADIA: Yes, the Supreme Court may dictate terms to society, but unless the actual medical field can simply say we have been mutilating and abusing kids, then we as a society just have not returned to normal.

For Elle Palmer, the greatest healing has come through being honest with herself and others about her story.

PALMER: I've realized that hiding my past self is what I try to do when I transitioned and I don't want to do that again. I don't like that it happened But I like that I feel comfortable enough to share it with people.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Juliana Chan Erikson.

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