A Dallas-based legal group is representing detransitioners who allege medical malpractice against the doctors who provided them sex alteration treatments when they were young.
Campbell Miller Payne was founded this year and has taken legal action against various doctors and medical organizations. The group has represented detransitioning individuals in states ranging from Texas to Rhode Island, filing lawsuits against doctors, hospitals, and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
The legal group was co-founded by Jordan Campbell, Ron Miller, Josh Payne, and Daniel Sepulveda. The group was founded “out of a heart for individuals who were misled and abused — many as children — into psychological and physical harm through a false promise of ‘gender-affirming care,'” the group’s website states. “We exist to speak up for these victims, assert their rights, and pursue justice.”
Their lawsuit against the AAP focuses on Isabelle Ayala, who was greenlit for transgender hormone usage at 14 years old after being committed to a hospital for having suicidal thoughts. She attempted suicide six months into her testosterone regimen. She continued to take the hormones and did not stop until she moved away from Rhode Island.
The lawsuit on behalf of Ayala was filed against AAP and the doctors who treated her.
“Isabelle is now twenty years old and longs for what could have been and to have her healthy, female body back,” the lawsuit states. “The changes the testosterone has had on her body are a constant reminder that she needed an unbiased medical expert willing to evaluate her mental health and provide her the care she needed, rather than a group of ideologues set on promoting their own agenda and furthering a broader conspiracy at her expense.”
Another lawsuit filed by Campbell Miller Payne concerns the case of Prisha Mosley, who began to transition to a man at 16 and later had sex alteration surgery. The lawsuit was filed against several doctors and medical institutions in North Carolina.
Mosley was diagnosed with depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and an eating disorder but was continually encouraged to transition.
“They told me that changing my body to look like a boy’s body would cure my mental health problems. They told me that injecting large amounts of testosterone into my female body would be good for me. They also encouraged me to undergo surgery to remove my healthy breasts,” she wrote in a Fox News op-ed.
A third case from the legal group involves Soren Aldaco in Texas. Aldaco alleges that doctors “relentlessly pressed her on the topic” of becoming transgender. She said subsequent surgeries left her unable to breastfeed and damaged her vagina.
“This lawsuit details a chronology of wrongful acts committed by a collective of medical providers who, in their pursuit of experimental ‘gender-affirming’ medical therapies, administered a series of ruinous procedures and treatments to … Soren Aldaco, who was then a vulnerable teenager struggling with a slew of mental health issues,” the legal complaint states.
An extensive list of medical groups and institutions advocate for underage access to transgender hormones, citing studies that show improvements in mental health.
“These findings are in line with the multiple medical professional organizations, such as the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the [AAP], that maintain expert standards of medical care for trans youths, including the impact of gender-affirming care on mental health,” Washington University’s School of Public Health claims.
A JAMA Surgery analysis of studies alleges, however, that there is no medical consensus on the impact of transgender treatments on mental health, with some showing improvements and others finding no correlation.
