Detransitioners Feel ‘Relief’ After Trump Executive Order Provides Legal Recourse for Child Sex-Change Victims

Young adults deceived by the transgender medicine industry into irreversibly altering their bodies to change sexes have the opportunity for legal remedy due to a presidential executive order this week.

Claire Abernathy started identifying as a transgender male at the age of 12. She started taking testosterone shortly after she turned 14, two months after her first appointment with a gender therapist. She got a double mastectomy six months later.

It only took a year for her to start to regret it, and she started detransitioning at 16. Now, the 20-year-old is committed to saving other young people from irreversibly harming their bodies.

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She said she wishes there had been something in place to protect her like President Donald Trump’s executive order Tuesday prohibiting the government from supporting or funding child gender transitions.

“It makes me emotional, to be honest,” she told The Daily Signal, “knowing that a group that has been so deeply harmed and ignored for so long is finally having our voices heard.”

The executive order says the attorney general will, “in consultation with the Congress, work to draft, propose, and promote legislation to enact a private right of action for children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged by medical professionals practicing chemical and surgical mutilation, which should include a lengthy statute of limitations.”

The stated reason for the executive order is that “countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”  

“Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes,” the order continues, “as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.”

Many detransitioners were supportive of Trump’s presidential campaign, believing he would listen to their experiences and seek solutions to the transgender indoctrination of American youth, detransitioner Prisha Mosely told The Daily Signal.

About 100 detransitioners wrote a letter to the Senate urging lawmakers to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary because of his “impressive track record of advocating for true informed consent in health care.”

People need to know how badly transgender medical interventions harm kids, Abernathy said, and the executive order is a step in the right direction.

“Many people still believe that what happened to me either doesn’t happen or is very rare,” she said. “Neither is true.”

Ron Miller, a lawyer with Dallas, Texas-based Campbell Miller Payne PLLC, which represents detransitioners, including Mosely and Chloe Cole, said he was encouraged Trump followed through on his commitment to end child gender transitions.

“The vast majority of Americans support this move,” Miller said. “If the [executive order] is a reflection of culture’s increasing shift against accepting “gender-affirming care,” which we believe it to be, then the EO is definitely an exciting step towards no longer accepting—and, hopefully, preventing—further abuse of some of the most vulnerable.”

After being sexually assaulted at the age of 14, Mosely, now 26, was influenced by trans activists to believe she was transgender. She socially transitioned to male at 15 and started on testosterone at 17. At 18, she had a double mastectomy, which she regretted by age 25.

She said her primary response to Trump’s executive order was “relief.”

“Relief was the feeling,” she told The Daily Signal. “Like, excitement and joy and stuff came after, but it was relief. I don’t want my kids to grow up being told the things I was told by other people, and I don’t want to continue to go outside, especially to places like Pride and see young people who are using walkers for no reason, who have mastectomy scars when they were previously healthy.”

Mosely miraculously gave birth to a healthy baby boy in June, even though transgender hormone treatments are known to have sterilizing effects on women’s bodies.

“I don’t like getting messages from parents that their children are gone, or they’re going to lose them in a divorce, or they can’t stop their doctor from prescribing drugs and surgery without calling [child protective services] on them and stuff like that,” she said. “I felt relief.”

The executive order directs the attorney general to prioritize investigations and take action to end policies that allow states to take custody away from parents who don’t allow their child to attempt to transition.

Mosely thinks more detransitioner lawsuits against the doctors who lied to teens that they could change sexes will result from the executive order.

“Crimes against children have been committed and abuses,” she said, “and I think accountability needs to come, and this is a step toward that.”

Miller said most detransitioners that his law firm has spoken to are interested in suing out of the desire to prevent these procedures from happening to anyone else.

“Consequently, we suspect they will be very pleased as prevailing public sentiment against these practices builds,” he told The Daily Signal.

Miller hopes Congress answers the president’s call for legislation expanding victims’ access to the courts.

“We are optimistic that the publicity generated by the EO will help more victims come forward,” he added, “and even more so if the EO gets implemented in a way that creates a federal cause of action, which we would expect to come with an extended statute of limitations.”

Mosely knows a lot of detransitioners who couldn’t file lawsuits because of lapsed statutes of limitations will now be able to because the order extends them.

“It takes a long time to deprogram, to come to terms with what happened, to realize it was wrong, to be able to stomach that, to be able to say it publicly afterwards, to find help, lawyers, to get money for that, all of it,” she said. “It’s a lot that doesn’t happen in a matter of one or two—or usually even three—years. It takes a lot longer.”

The executive order also directs the health and human services secretary to establish new guidelines on treating kids with gender dysphoria. Mosely said she would recommend dialectical behavioral therapy, which teaches patients to calm themselves instead of seeking outside affirmation.

“If you know who you are, you don’t need someone else to tell you that to feel like you’re safe or valid or affirmed, or anything,” she said. “You can just know.”

“We need to teach children that they’re resilient and that they’re strong, and that they can face things, and that they’re wonderful, and that it’s good to be a boy, and it’s also good to be a girl, and there are good things coming, and when it’s not good, that’s OK,” she added. “They just have to sit with it and get through it and tolerate the distress.”

Simon Amaya Price, 20, is a “desister,” someone who identified as transgender but decided to live in accordance with his biological gender instead of undergoing medical interventions.

Amaya Price, who has been diagnosed with autism, experienced social ostracism and a mental health crisis in ninth grade, leading him to decide his problem was that he was actually a girl.

He told his therapist, who affirmed his gender dysphoria and referred him to Boston Children’s Hospital for hormones and surgeries. Amaya Price’s pediatrician told him and his father that they could choose between having a “dead son or a living daughter” and that the then-14-year-old Amaya Price would kill himself if denied hormones and surgery.

Thankfully, Amaya Price said, his father immediately shut down the possibility of a medical transition.

He is happy that the executive order will prevent other youths from medically transitioning.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Amaya Price told The Daily Signal. “It’s a big step in the right direction, but it’s one step of many.”

He would like to see laws passed that go a step further than the executive order by explicitly criminalizing the “act of sex-trait modification in pediatric settings,” he said. “I think that’s what needs to happen for us to really end the practice itself.”

Amaya Price has a number of friends, including his girlfriend, who are detransitioners suing the doctors and surgeons who prescribed them hormones and performed surgeries.

“It’s one thing to change a law but it’s another thing to change a culture,” he said, “and we don’t have a playbook for how we’re going to de-radicalize these people who’ve been told for the past … half a decade to a decade, that there’s a trans genocide going on, and that if they don’t get ‘gender-affirming care,’ they’re going to kill themselves.”