Detransitioner Claire Abernathy was just 14 years old when doctors told her parents she’d take her own life without hormones and surgery — and promised “gender care” would save her life.
“I started identifying as trans when I was 12 years old following a sexual assault and some pretty severe bullying that I was experiencing at school,” Abernathy tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Program.”
“Adopting this identity gave me, well, one, it gave me the ability to pretend to be a new person, someone that this didn’t happen to. And it also gave me an entire social network, a whole friend group of other kids who felt similarly to the way I did,” she explains.
That’s when Abernathy began going to therapists who were recommended by others with the same issues.
“They made my parents feel like abusers for being skeptical, for wanting to take pause before making irreparable changes to their child’s body,” she tells Glenn.
“Did anyone say, did any doctor say, ‘Hang on, we should look at the abuse’?” Glenn asks.
“No one. My mom asked about the abuse, the bullying, all these things that I’d gone through, disordered eating, and she was told in no uncertain terms, ‘No, that does not make a child think that they’re trans,’” Abernathy explains, noting that this occurred at “one of the most well-funded children’s hospitals in the nation.”
Abernathy was then put on testosterone at 14 years old, and then shortly after they were discussing surgery.
“I started testosterone in November of 2018, and by January, I was approved for surgery. It didn’t happen until June, but that was just because we wanted to wait until the summer between my eighth and ninth grade years,” she says.
Doctors told Abernathy and her parents that the only effective treatment for her “gender dysphoria” was “chemical and surgical intervention” and that if she did not go through with it, “the most likely outcome was suicide.”
“They didn’t tell me that it would permanently take away my ability to breastfeed. They didn’t tell me that the majority of kids who look to pursue this end up growing out of it,” she says. “There was a lot of things that I wasn’t told.”
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