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Molly Hennessy-Fiske

AUSTIN — At 25, college student Prisha Mosley doesn’t consider herself conservative. She was raised “a leftist my whole life, and quite radical at times.” She has face piercings, dyes her hair bright red, supports same-sex marriage, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a> rights and gun control, and rejects gender stereotypes.

But several life-changing decisions forever shaped how others see her.

In her teens, Mosley transitioned from female to male. Last year, she detransitioned and joined forces with conservative activists fighting to ban the gender-affirming care she had received.

Mosley is among more than a dozen detransitioners who have gained prominence this year, suing the doctors and clinics from which they received care in more than half a dozen states, headlining conservative events and starring in documentaries often sponsored by right-wing groups.

Some have testified for restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. At least 22 states, most run by Republicans, have passed such restrictions this year. To state legislatures and conferences, the detransitioners have offered themselves up as evidence of what they say are the risks and consequences of gender-affirming care, even though it has been endorsed by the nation’s largest medical groups, including the American Medical Association.

Mosley said she has paid a price for her entry into politics: After she began publicly testifying for nearly a dozen proposed laws in Texas and other red states, she said, she was chased to her car by opponents, had things thrown at her and received death threats. She has become estranged from former LGBTQ+ allies, even though she shares many of their views on other issues.

“They treat me like a betrayer,” Mosley said.

While Mosley said she has been treated “compassionately and humanely” by conservatives, defying stereotypes she once held, she still doesn’t fully identify with them, either. She feels “politically homeless,” longing to be seen and heard in all her complexity.

She advocates for extreme limits on gender-affirming care, but sees herself as a moderate. Indeed, like Mosley, most Americans oppose medication and hormone treatments for minors and say gender is determined at birth, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/05/trans-poll-gop-politics-laws/" target=_blank>a Washington Post poll </a>conducted a year ago found.

“I no longer politically align with any party’s ideas,” she said. “I’ve been forced to learn the value of the middle ground.”

Jon Cherry

On social media sites, detransitioners often mark their profiles with the icon of a salamander — an animal that regenerates lost body parts. More than 50,000 users have joined a Reddit “detrans” discussion channel, although it’s impossible to verify how many members are detransitioners.

There’s much debate about how many Americans have detransitioned.

Perhaps <a href="https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/" target="_blank">1.6 million people</a> age 13 or older in the United States identify as transgender, according to a survey by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. Less than a third of people who consider themselves transgender have used hormone treatments or puberty blockers, and only about 1 in 6 have undergone gender-affirming surgery, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/23/transgender-adults-transitioning-poll/" target="_blank">the Washington Post-KFF poll</a> found. Fewer still have sought to reverse those actions.

But as conservatives have mounted a concerted effort to limit trans and gay rights, particularly in red-state legislatures, a small minority of detransitioners like Mosley have gained prominence.

It was late summer, and Mosley had traveled from her home in Michigan to Texas to join female activists planning a protest at the state Capitol during Austin’s annual Pride celebration.

The activists were there to prevent expansion of transgender rights and support a proposed state law that would define and limit a person’s gender in vital documents to what it was at birth, male or female. They were lobbying lawmakers to consider the bill during a special legislative session. Earlier in the year, Kansas’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto to pass a similar law that took effect in July.

At an Austin hotel, they met to talk security and strategy. There was Laura Becker, a detransitioner from Wisconsin whom Mosley knew, as well as conservative women, left-leaning feminists and at least one lesbian. Their political affiliations were all over the map, but what united them, they said, was the fear that the movement for transgender rights was threatening to erase not just the term “women,” but also women’s rights and spaces.

They carried signs reading “Biology isn’t bigotry,” “Being a woman is not a hate crime” and “Gender identity is a lie.” A lesbian activist wore a T-shirt that said “LGB Alliance,” without the “T” for transgender.

Mosley was greeted by the leader of the protest, Republican activist Michelle Evans, who ran unsuccessfully for a Texas state House seat last year. Evans has championed bans on LGBTQ+ books and transgender access to women’s sports and bathrooms.

Mosley said she mostly agreed with Evans on those issues. She said that she had seen some of the books Evans opposed that were “graphic and inappropriate for children”; that “there are safety issues that arise when individuals of the opposite sex use the same bathroom”; and that it was “unfair and unsafe for biological males to participate in women’s sports.”

“At the same time, I believe trans-identifying people shouldn’t be excluded from society,” Mosley said, adding that, for instance, they should be allowed to compete in sports against one another.

“I believe that everyone should be treated with respect and compassion,” she said. “It is disrespectful, and lacking in compassion, to contend that individuals who do not conform to gender stereotypes must undergo harmful medical procedures to try to become a member of the opposite sex.”

Evans wore a “Female lives matter” T-shirt and a handgun in a purple holster clipped to her waist. She introduced the group’s security: armed guards in black tactical gear plus volunteers from a Texas motorcycle club, some carrying AR-15s.

They strategized about how to approach the Capitol (by car), where to park (several blocks away), how to stand (ringed by security) and how to act with counterprotesters (nonconfrontational).

As she arrived at the Capitol, Mosley could see the oak tree where they planned to protest. Next to it, about a hundred people hoisted rainbow signs and shouted, “Trans rights are human rights!” Two carried AR-15s, including a man in a tactical vest with a rainbow patch.

Mosley has lived in gun-friendly states. Still, she was unnerved by the weaponry. A half-dozen state troopers, some on horseback, patrolled in the sweltering heat.

Mosley strapped on a borrowed GoPro camera. If anyone approached, she said, she would be filming. Mosley adjusted the harness over her baby blue, flowered sundress.

As a teen, Mosley began to suffer from anorexia, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. At 14, she said, she was sexually assaulted, became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.

“I believed that it was a woman’s place to be sexually harmed by men, that it was natural,” she said.

By 15, she started role-playing online as a man, unbeknownst to her parents. The idea of physically transitioning came from online friends who told her that her anorexia was caused “by being born in the wrong body and that I was really a boy,” she said.

Mosley said she saw doctors and therapists who diagnosed her with gender dysphoria. Her father, a carpenter, and her mother, a homemaker, initially opposed her transition, she said, but ultimately “supported me as their child.”

“It was clear to me and my family that something was wrong and I needed help,” she said. In hindsight, she said, her parents were “misled” by doctors and therapists.

At 16, doctors prescribed Mosley injections to stop her from menstruating. At 17, they prescribed testosterone that led her to grow body and facial hair. At 18, at her request, surgeons removed her breasts. Mosley began to identify publicly as Charlie, changing her driver’s license and other official identification.

In the first few years after she transitioned, Mosley said, she felt satisfied. She moved in with like-minded LGBTQ+ roommates in Florida. But the relief proved to be temporary.

While Mosley had therapy before transitioning, she said it was only in post-transition sessions that she realized “all of the magic that was supposed to happen when I transitioned — the healing and the euphoria — actually happened from healing my trauma” from sexual assault and other childhood issues.

Last fall, she decided to detransition. She stopped taking hormones, identified once again as a woman and began speaking out against transgender medical treatment for minors. She has started taking estrogen and progesterone, undergone laser hair removal on her face and chest, and raised money on GoFundMe for breast reconstruction.

“I decided that I didn’t want to be a woman before I had ever experienced being a woman. I had no idea what being a woman was like because I was a child. Now I feel like I will never entirely know,” she said in the first of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utncd9-VxPg&list=PL7UBFgak8M98wNJfNhqQ-RBgDhawEavQ2" target=_blank>a series of YouTube video diaries</a> that drew more than 1,750 subscribers.

“I just took the cure that was handed to me,” she said through sobs. “ … I just don’t want anyone else to feel this way. I lost my voice. I lost my chest. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to have kids. I feel like no one wants to date me or love me because I’m ruined.”

The video has been viewed about 16,000 times and elicited more than 380 mostly supportive comments. Some parents of transgender children contacted Mosley to say their children had suffered after transitioning, she said, inspiring her to testify for laws restricting gender-affirming care for minors.

“They heard my pain and shared theirs,” Mosley told The Post. While she was afraid to testify at first, “I continued to tell myself that it was scarier to let this happen to another child.”

In July, <a href="https://cmppllc.com/our-cases" target=_blank>she sued</a> the North Carolina doctors, therapists and clinics that provided her with surgery, hormones and other gender-affirming care, alleging fraud and malpractice. The Dallas-based law firm representing her has filed three other lawsuits in the past year on behalf of detransitioners it calls “individuals who were misled and abused — many as children.”

Mosley’s former doctors and therapists denied those claims and asked a judge to dismiss her lawsuit due to what they said was a lack of evidence and an expired statute of limitations. In a court filing, they argued that Mosley passed mental health screening and that she pursued hormones and surgery even after being informed of the risks. Sarah Lincoln, the Charlotte-based attorney representing those Mosley sued, said via staff this week that she had no comment about the lawsuit.

With her lawsuit pending, Mosley has become a more prominent witness for Republicans seeking to ban gender-affirming care. They credit her and other detransitioners with helping the measures succeed.

“My body feels like it doesn’t belong to me. I miss it every day,” Mosley <a href="https://www.ohiochannel.org/collections/ohio-senate-government-oversight-committee" target=_blank>testified last month in Ohio</a> before a state legislative committee considering a law to restrict gender-affirming care. “ … Legislation preventing children from undergoing such life-altering procedures could have protected me.”

She shared similar details with lawmakers in Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina. All except Maine and South Carolina approved the laws she supported banning gender-affirming care for minors. (Maine ultimately passed a law to allow transgender youths age 16 and over who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria to receive medically necessary health care.) Mosley said some private groups assisted her financially when she traveled to testify.

In North Carolina, state Rep. Ken Fontenot (R), an educator, pastor and co-sponsor of the ban on gender-affirming care, met with Mosley and other detransitioners before the law passed.

“All of their stories I found really striking,” he said. “ … They were very, very influential with some of the [lawmakers] we got to side with us and in the end not oppose us as vociferously.”

Where measures have been passed to limit transgender rights

‘Folks do get very emotional about it’

Texas state Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Houston Democrat and the first Black woman elected to her House seat, said meeting several Texas-based detransitioners was her first taste of the “vitriol” directed at them by activists supporting transgender rights.

“They have every right to share their experience,” she said. “As Democrats, that’s been one of the biggest parts of our platform: We don’t tell marginalized groups how to think, feel and speak.”

Thierry was one of four Texas Democrats who voted to ban gender-affirming care for minors last spring, but she became the focus of a backlash after delivering <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q28QMWm_saA" target=_blank>a floor speech in support of the law</a>. Her office was “inundated” with complaints, Thierry said, and she was harassed online.

“I’ve had racial epithets hurled at me, death threats, people telling me on Mother’s Day they hope my daughter wakes up an orphan,” she said.

Rachel Hill, government affairs director for Equality Texas, an LGBTQ++ advocacy group that fought the law, said at least one detransitioner wrote to Texas lawmakers opposing it. But those comments weren’t highlighted by the bill’s sponsors, Hill said, because “the voices of detransitioners that get the most amplification are a really cherry-picked group.

“They find folks who have had a really bad experience with care,” like Mosley, Hill said. “And it’s unfortunate because there are so many other folks who for whatever reason stop care and don’t have the same political agenda.”

While some LGBTQ++ people feel threatened by detransitioners like Mosley who want to restrict gender-affirming care, Hill said, many view other detransitioners with more nuance.

“I don’t think the community is against detransitioners as a whole,” Hill said, just those “who are advocating for their care to be taken away. Folks do get very emotional about it.”

Mikala Compton

The next front for Mosley and conservative lawmakers is a battle to restrict transgender rights not just for minors, but also for adults, which Mosley was when she underwent surgery.

In October, 18 state attorneys general <a href="https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2023-10-17/gop-leaders-and-medical-groups-clash-over-floridas-restrictions-on-gender-affirming-care" target="_blank">submitted a brief </a>in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in defense of Florida blocking state Medicaid programs from covering gender-affirming care for adults and minors. Those impacted by the ban had sued in federal court, and after a judge ruled in their favor this summer, the state appealed.

Mosley said she is doing what she can to press for such restrictions and ultimately thinks states should outlaw all transitioning.

“The goal of medicine is health, and I do not believe ‘gender-affirming care’ promotes health,” she said. “It is only damaging.”

As she <a href="https://personandidentity.com/prisha-mosleys-testimony-to-south-carolina-senate/" target=_blank>testified in South Carolina’s legislature</a> earlier this year, Mosley sees gender-affirming treatment as akin to lobotomies, once used for mental health treatment and now disdained as inhumane.

Mosley told The Post that she supports government efforts to expand mental health care instead of gender-affirming care, “so that individuals suffering from gender dysphoria can have something to reach toward that doesn’t make their condition worse.

“Whatever the child is experiencing is real — such as mental illness, gender dysphoria, thoughts of suicide. Those feelings should be validated,” Mosley said. “The trans delusion, however, is not true. A child cannot become the opposite sex. The delusion that a child could change his or her gender shouldn’t be affirmed.”

Those Mosley is lobbying against include Sofia Sepulveda, who said calling transgender people mentally ill and likening gender-affirming care to lobotomies was “hateful rhetoric.”

“It literally takes me back to when I was little and I lived in a family that wasn’t affirming, who every time I tried to express myself they would hit me and punish me,” said Sepulveda, 47, of San Antonio, who started taking hormones at 21 and had transition surgery two years ago.

Sepulveda protested the Texas law and heard some of Mosley’s testimony. She said that when detransitioners try to restrict transgender rights, “what I hear is a lot of internalized transphobia.”

“Republicans are not our friends, not when you’re trans, when you’re queer, when you’re Black, when you’re a woman,” she said. “You’re not protected. But they can’t see that.”

By the time Mosley and her fellow activists arrived at the Capitol in Austin, the Pride event was well underway, with thousands lining the streets. The group’s security formed a tight perimeter around her. Supporters raised their cellphones to live-stream her remarks.

Mosley was nervous. She had printed out her speech, and she held the paper in front of her as she stepped to the microphone, hands trembling.

“I am here to tell you that biological reality exists. It is not hateful. It is immutable, and it cannot be changed. Trust me: I tried,” she said evenly.

Mosley could barely be heard over LGBTQ+ activists’ chants: “Trans rights are human rights!”

“It is impossible to change your sex. I removed my breasts and I took testosterone for years and I am still a woman. I always was,” Mosley said.

Finished with her speech, Mosley overrode the advice of her security team. She walked past the guards, toward the transgender rights advocates. Despite the crowd, the heat and the guns, she said later, she wanted the other side to hear her.

She approached a White woman wearing an “I support Black trans futures” T-shirt and holding a sign that said, “Trans rights are human rights.”

Mosley held up her own sign: “Listen to detransitioners.”

Her hands were no longer shaking. After several moments of shouting back and forth, Mosley walked away. There was no middle ground. But she had her say.

2018 APME International Perspective

2015 Overseas Press Club

2013 DART Award

2012 Livingston Finalist

Harvard College, BA Social Studies, 1999

Molly Hennessy-Fiske joined The Post in 2022 as a national reporter based in Texas covering breaking news and red states.

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How ‘detransitioners’ are influencing conservative transgender care laws

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