Detransitioned woman to sue doctors who removed her uterus during mental health crisis

A transitioning woman who underwent surgery to remove her breasts and uterus is suing the health care providers who reportedly facilitated her transition.

Michelle Zacchigna, 34, filed a lawsuit against the eight doctors and mental health professionals who prescribed testosterone treatments and performed a bilateral mastectomy and hysterectomy during what she says was a mental health crisis.

Over a ten-year period, she went from seeing a therapist to being referred for hormone therapy by doctors with whom she had limited interaction, including one she says she spoke to for less than an hour, to undergoing irreversible surgery and better decide mental health diagnoses. she explained her condition than anything else in 2020.

“I will live the rest of my life without breasts, with a deep voice and male pattern baldness, and without the ability to get pregnant,” she said. wrote.

“Removing my fully healthy uterus is my biggest regret,”

Zacchigna claims that professionals failed to adequately address his mental health needs and allowed him to undergo irreversible procedures on his body and suppress feminizing characteristics with testosterone

Michelle was referred to hormone therapy after speaking with a handful of professionals.

Michelle is suing eight medical professionals, including doctors and mental health professionals, for their part in her ten-year transition.

After a suicide attempt in 2008, she began seeing Dr. Nadine Lulu, who became her regular therapist, presenting her as an “ideal candidate” for hormone therapy in July 2010.

That spring, she had talked with a therapist at a Toronto support group for less than an hour before hormone therapy was recommended.

Rupert Raj, one of the therapists running the group, is one of the defendants in the case, as well as Dr. Rick Lindal, who apparently did not know Michelle before recommending her for hormone therapy.

With these recommendations from multiple medical professionals in the space of a year, Michelle began the transition in 2010.

Dr. Pamela Lecce, Dr. Cavacuiti and Dr. Suzanne Turner apparently did not consult with a psychologist before prescribing testosterone for Michelle.

Michelle came and went with mental health issues until Lulu sent her for a full psychological exam with Dr. Rowden, in which various diagnoses were made but her gender dysphoria was left unexplored.

Two years later, still struggling with her identity, a professional refers her to a procedure to remove her uterus, which ends in May 2018.

But it was the diagnoses in 2015 that I would return to when I decided to transition out in 2020.

She wrote in a mail for the Gender Dysphoria Alliance about a difficult time at school that led to anxiety and depression: ‘As a child, I was bullied daily by my peers, by older children, and sometimes even by younger children. I felt like everyone at my elementary school knew that I was “different.”

“My mom once remembered the school bus coming up to my house and I could hear the whole bus full of kids singing mean things to me.”

Later in her life, she says, she “began connecting with the LGBT community online” and “discovered that many people who identify as asexual were also gender variant.”

She wrote that she thought more about gender and became convinced that she “had been harassed because she was trans and just didn’t know it.”

After transitioning, Michelle found her mental health improved for a while before she ‘crashed’.

She said in a crowdfunding video: “It took me 10 years to figure out why something like this might have been falsely believed, and why so many professionals might have wrongly encouraged it.”

“I imagine there are many people who will eventually find themselves in my position, some of them vulnerable adults like me and others too young to understand the long-term consequences.”

A photo Michelle shared of herself after beginning her transition journey.

Transitioning woman who had her breasts and uterus removed during a mental health crisis

Michelle Zacchigna, 34, filed a lawsuit against the eight doctors and mental health professionals who prescribed testosterone treatments for her.

The success of the surgery is a contentious issue.

The head psychiatrist of a Finnish state-approved pediatric center said four out of five young people who do not receive professional intervention will come to accept their bodies.

He warned that there was a problem of “deliberate misinformation” among US doctors pressuring parents to transition their youngsters.

Research has shown that young people are more likely to come out as trans if they have friends who have already done so, although the cause cannot be inferred from the correlation.

A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis of ‘quality of life in people with transsexuality after surgery‘, looking at 1,099 patients, found that quality of life was generally better for people who had surgery, but that transgender people remain at risk of poor quality of life and mental health problems.

He noted that ‘[transexuality] it can become a source of identity crisis due to the… effects on the personality and behavioral system of individuals as well as their social adjustment.’

The authors wrote that the subjective experience of quality of life is difficult to report and that people “may have very different opinions about their quality of life and report it differently,” making a decisive review difficult.

Therapeutic hormones and surgical procedures can, he said, improve satisfaction and self-confidence by “harmonizing” gender and identity, but the study notes that transgender people tend to suffer from a poorer overall quality of life.