A detransitioned 18-year-old girl has filed a letter of intent to sue a healthcare company and the doctors who gave her puberty-blockers, at age 12, and then removed her breasts a year later.
Layla Jane claims Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Group, and the doctors who treated her rushed her into transgender medical treatments without proper informed consent.
In the letter sent last week by her attorney Harmeet Dhillon, to the anticipated defendants, Layla made the claim they “performed, supervised, and/or advised transgender hormone therapy and surgical intervention for her when she was between 12-17 years old, which constitutes a breach of the standard of care.”
Thank you @IngrahamAngle for having me and Layla Jane on tonight!@Liberty_Ctr, @_LiMandri_Jonna & my firm are taking legal action against the Kaiser medical “professionals” who mutilated Layla with top surgery at age 13 for profit. This is malpractice & https://t.co/FJruP5VzDk… pic.twitter.com/s23qMzlyA1
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) March 17, 2023
“Overall, I really want to say that I don’t think I should have been allowed to change my sex before I can legally consent to have sex,” she told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Thursday. “Overall, I don’t think I’m better off for the experience and I think transition just completely added fuel to the fire that was my preexisting conditions.”
Dhillon, who appeared with her client, added:
The problem here is that the doctors at Kaiser, as we’ve seen from the file in this case, were all over the place. Certain of them initially said, you know, she’s too young and then others were saying, oh, we’ll be happy to do the surgery at age 13. She was not given the mental health treatment necessary, and it was not disclosed to her family or to her that, for example, teenage transitioners desist from transition at an 80 to 90% rate, that the majority of people who go through this regret it later on, that it wasn’t a solution for her mental health problems, that many girls, in fact, most girls, probably struggle with puberty. And, so, it is our position legally as a matter of law that informed consent was missing here, because it is it impossible for a child to give informed consent.
“You also performed acts that constitute intentional fraud and concealment,” the letter of intent to sue states, adding a complaint will be filed in California Superior Court “after ninety days of the date of this letter, unless this matter can be resolved prior to that time.”
The letter asserts Layla is a “biological female who had a complex array of mental health symptoms as a child and adolescent,” describing symptoms as general anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, mania symptoms, wrist-cutting, and suicidal ideation.
“Layla had some gender confusion from a very young age that became more pronounced with the onset of puberty,” the letter continues, noting that the child “came out as transgender” at 11 years old, “and desired to ‘transition’ to the opposite sex.”
While two of Layla’s original medical providers stated Kaiser’s official policies would not allow her to begin cross-sex hormones until she was 16, and transgender surgery until she was 18, she ultimately began working with Drs. Lisa Taylor, Winnie Mao Yiu Tong, and Susanne Watson, who “immediately approved Layla for cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy at ages 12-13, without performing an adequate evaluation and treatment of Layla’s extensive mental health co-morbidities,” the letter claims.
Layla also asserts her parents were pressed to agree to these transgender medical interventions via the intentional concealment of the lack of adequate clinical studies supporting the treatment, and were the victims of “fraudulent misrepresentations,” such as the common narrative that her immediate transition to another gender could prevent risk of suicide.
The doctors falsely represented, the letter states, “that Layla presented an increased risk of suicide unless she transitioned,” and presented her parents “with the false dilemma that: ‘would they rather have a live son, or a dead daughter?’”
In February, Biden Transgender Assistant Secretary for Health for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Rachel Levine promised “gender-affirming” clinic employees at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center that the idea of transgender children will soon become normalized, especially with the “highest support” of the Biden administration.
The Biden health official presented a common narrative of LGBTQ activists that “gender-affirming care” is essential to prevent trans-identified youth from committing suicide.
Levine claimed “numerous peer-reviewed journals have noted that there is nothing inherent with being transgender that predisposes youth to negative mental health outcomes,” adding:
It is the bullying, the harassment, and discrimination that transgender youth face that leads to these conditions. Transgender youth who are supported by their parents, school, and community, who receive evidence-based standard of care treatment actually have excellent mental health outcomes. Gender-affirming care is medical care, gender-affirming care is mental health care, and, literally, gender-affirming care is suicide prevention care.
The “transition or die” narrative, however, has been debunked.
The Biden health official continues to cite the controversial Trevor Project, a so-called “suicide prevention organization” for LGBTQ youth for its statistics. The activist group’s 2022 National Survey of LGBTQ youth, apparently found 56 percent of the youth surveyed “reported their mental health is poor.”
That outcome, Levine said, is due to the “bullying, harassment, and discrimination” these young people experience.
The Trevor Project’s “research,” with its samples that often rely on online self-reports, predictably concludes an “alarmingly high risk of suicide” among LGBTQ young people.
Such reporting, however, “frequently conflates suicidal thoughts and non-suicidal self-harm with serious suicide attempts and completed suicides,” observed Dr. Stephen Levine and his colleagues in a study published in March 2022 in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy:
Until recently, little was known about the actual rate of suicide of trans-identified youth. However, a recent analysis of data from the biggest pediatric gender clinic in the world, the UK’s Tavistock, found the rate of completed youth suicides to be 0.03% over a 10-year period, which translates into the annual rate of 13 per 100,000 (Biggs, 2022). While this rate is significantly elevated compared to the general population of teens, it is far from the epidemic of trans suicides portrayed by the media.
Stephen Levine also highlighted that “gender-affirmative care,” i.e., social, medical, and surgical interventions in response to gender dysphoria, is “still based on very low-quality evidence.”
“The many risks of these interventions, including medicalizing a temporary adolescent identity, have come into a clearer focus through an awareness of detransitioners,” he asserted, adding that while the lack of high-quality evidence for the success of these interventions should demand a comprehensive informed consent about their “risks and long-term outcomes,” the process is restricted by “erroneous professional assumptions; poor quality of the initial evaluations; and inaccurate and incomplete information shared with patients and their parents.”
The question of suicide is inappropriately handled,” Stephen Levine and his colleagues continued:
[T]he “transition or die” narrative, whereby parents are told that their only choice is between a “live trans daughter or a dead son” (or vice-versa), is both factually inaccurate and ethically fraught. Disseminating such alarmist messages hurts the majority of trans-identified youth who are not at risk for suicide. It also hurts the minority who are at risk, and who, as a result of such misinformation, may forgo evidence-based suicide prevention interventions in the false hopes that transition will prevent suicide.
Following the transgender hormones and double mastectomy, Dhillon’s letter claims Layla suffered even “more intensely” from her mental health disorders and ultimately decided to detransition.
Detransitioner @LJDetrans makes her first public appearance at Detrans Awareness Day in Sacramento last week.
Layla Jane had her breasts removed at 13 years old and is now suing some of the same "doctors" that I am suing.
This is just the beginning, we will get justice.… pic.twitter.com/vq4e2nXmNt
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) March 19, 2023
Dhillon, who is the CEO of the Center for American Liberty, also represents 18-year-old Chloe Cole, another detransitioner from California, who has also sued Kaiser for giving her puberty blockers and removing her breasts when she was 15 years old.
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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Layla Jane” by Chloe Cole.
