Bipolar Teen’s History of Abuse and Psychosis Didn’t Stop Docs From Prescribing Testosterone, Mastectomy

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a series on individuals who have “detransitioned” in the wake of gender-related medical interventions. Read the first installment, on a British man who was pressured into castration by a U.K. gender clinic, here. 

At the age of four, North Carolina native Prisha Mosley was exposed to pornography. With the guardians in her life abusing drugs and alcohol, she had a disturbing early childhood, but it “truly fell apart at twelve” when she entered puberty.

By the time she was 14 years old, Mosley was diagnosed with psychotic major depression, ADHD, bipolar one and two, mania, anorexia, and borderline personality disorder, which she described as feeling like she had “no core.”

People with BPD have more mirror neurons than the average person, so they often mirror the behavior of others. This trait, she said, would make her more susceptible to getting swept into the social contagion of transgenderism. The absence of a sense of identity also left her vulnerable to the notion that she was actually a boy on the inside.

Before prescribing medical interventions for gender-dysphoric children, medical practitioners are taught that the child’s sense of dysphoria must be “persistent, consistent, and insistent.”

“But that is also a sign of neuroticism, OCD, autism,” Mosley told National Review.

During her later adolescent years, Mosley experienced psychosis.

“I was insane. It was documented. Every single time I had to see my therapist or psychologist, they had to ask me who the president was, what my name was, what year it was, and I could not always answer,” she said. “I would lose my space and time.”

Mosley self-harmed so frequently and deeply that she often had to get stiches. Her crippling anorexia, she said, stemmed from the inappropriate attention she received from boys in middle and high school.

“I stopped eating. I didn’t like that I was developing because boys were touching me all the time,” she said. “Boys would just walk past me and grab my breasts. A very common occurrence was throwing food or objects down my shirt, so I would have to pull it down and dig them out.”

The trauma kept coming. At 14 years old, Mosley was raped. She got pregnant, but her body was so malnourished that she miscarried. “I felt like I failed as a woman,” she said, and that made her question her gender again.

With few friends or support, Mosley landed on “pro-ana” Tumblr — an online community that encourages eating disorders.

“Others young girls and I posted naked pictures of our starving bodies so we could call each other fat,” she said of her blog, which eventually amassed 65,000 followers.

Transgender-identifying men came into the community, she said, and convinced her and other teenage girls that they couldn’t eat because they were born in the wrong body. In one post, Mosley reported that she had started growing hair all over her body.

“They told me that was a sign that my body was fighting to be a boy,” she said.

She learned later that her emaciated frame couldn’t regulate body temperature, so it produced more hair to keep her warm.

The online trans and eating-disorder spaces share some overlap, Mosley said. Some adult transgender people gravitate to corners with certain Tumblr hashtags, such as #cutting.

“They find vulnerable people using these tags,” she said. “When it comes to indoctrinating people into a cult, you go for the hurting and the weak-minded so you can love-bomb them. I was easy prey.”

Mosley often livestreamed herself discussing her mental-health struggles, which she says likely entertained the disturbed adults.

“I was trauma porn,” she said.

Due to her rapid weight loss and multiple suicide attempts, Mosley ended up in the hospital “a lot.”

Trans adults she met online told her that if she could only obtain a letter of recommendation for gender-transition treatments, it would unlock the door to happiness, she said. Without her parents’ knowledge, she went on the internet and discovered so-called gender-affirming specialists affiliated with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

After showing her parents a PowerPoint to prove she was transgender, Mosley persuaded them to let her get a letter of recommendation from a WPATH specialist, one of whom advertised a $280 deal. With the letter signed and sealed, Mosley met with a gender therapist for 15 minutes.

Mosley said the therapist asked her leading questions like, “Do you get along better with boys?” and “Do you dislike your period?”

Her affirmative answers meant she was a boy, according to the therapist. The therapist put her parents in a Catch-22 when it came to her prognosis, she said.

“She was brutal to my parents. She asked them, ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?’” Mosley said.

After the first appointment, the therapist said to come back when Mosley needed a letter of recommendation for “top surgery” and again for “bottom surgery.”

“I had no other choice. It was transition or suicide. I was totally convinced that I had a disease, and I had a boy brain and a girl body and that’s why I wanted to die all the time,” she said.

Mosley underwent an expensive process with the state to change her legal name. At 17 years old, she took her letter of recommendation to a pediatric endocrinologist and was prescribed testosterone. Every two weeks, she received injections in her barely 100-pound body.

At first, the hormone brought her immense bliss, she said. But then it all came crashing down.

“I’ll be honest. That period of euphoria that they talk about does exist. I thought that I was being healed and magic was happening, but I was high on drugs. Testosterone has a known confidence-boosting effect,” she said.

After the high faded, “it was a situation of chasing the dragon.” In earlier years, Mosley used opioids, she said. The peak feeling and withdrawal were the same with testosterone, she said. Ten days after every shot, she’d suffer lethargy, depression, loneliness, and aggression.

“I had serious rage. My dad would make me chop wood outside with an axe to get my rage out. I was never like that before. I was p**sed off all the time,” she said.

The first physical side effect of testosterone appeared in her genitals — a seldom discussed symptom colloquially referred to as “bottom growth” by online trans people.

“They told me that it was my penis growing and that I was turning into a man,” Mosley said. But really, the clitoris was growing past the clitoral hood to the point where it sticks out.

“You can’t even wear tight underwear because it’s abrasive and rubs against there. The clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the penis,” she said. “It’s incredibly painful. It can’t be touched. It’s large, ugly. I have atypical genitals now.”

“Trans people don’t bring it up because there’s no way to sugarcoat it once you know what it is,” she said.

Multiple other body parts, including her shoulders, hands, feet, face, as well as heart, expanded because of the testosterone. “That’s why the risk of heart attack and stroke increases. There’s no shrinking back,” she said.

Mosley developed severe vaginal atrophy, a condition she was warned about before beginning the hormones. Doctors told her she might experience sexual discomfort without lubrication and pre-stimulation.

But Mosley, after being raped at 14 years old, said, “I thought that meant I’d never be penetrated against my will again. It would take more effort. So, I thought it was a good thing.”

Her vaginal atrophy is so severe now that she cannot use a tampon. “It’s like a wall; it’s not a hole. If I do force something in, it will rip and tear because the walls are thinner and dry,” she said. At her last doctor’s visit, she was told the atrophy had spread to her uterus. “My uterus is folded over, and there are signs of uterine prolapse,” she said.

At 25 years old, Mosley is in menopause, she said. She doesn’t believe she’s fertile anymore.

Flash back seven years earlier, when Mosley received a letter of recommendation for a double mastectomy from a different therapist. In the letter, the therapist wrote that all of Mosley’s preexisting mental illnesses were caused by being born in the wrong body, she said.

“She said I was of sound mind and mentally stable, even though I had gotten out of the hospital two weeks prior for trying to kill myself again,” she said. “My letter of recommendation was full of lies, but I took it to a random plastic surgeon anyway.”

After one visit with the surgeon, not even a year after starting testosterone, Mosley had her breasts cut off.

It was a random plastic surgery clinic in the state, according to Mosley. The facility didn’t even keep her overnight for monitoring after the operation, she said, referring her instead to a local hotel it said it had a deal with, “which screamed ‘shady,’” she said.

Originally specializing in breast augmentation, the clinic started doing trans surgeries in recent years, likely to profit off the surge of new cases, Mosley said. “This is just a money-making thing,” she said.

A letter of recommendation for surgery need not be taken only to a gender clinic, Mosley noted.

“That’s also how they’re not reporting gender surgeries, because they’re not being done at gender clinics. You can take them anywhere,” she said.

Mosley had no idea what she was getting into with the procedure.

“While they remove the mammary and the fat, they cut up the nipples and reshape them. They make the areolas smaller and cut off the top of the nipple,” she said. “Then they sew it all back together, freeze the nipples, scrape your chest, then reattach the new, Frankenstein nipples to a different spot in your chest, in a more east-west male position.”

Some of her skin grafts failed, Mosley said. One day, she was pulling off her bandages, and half of her nipples came off. She said she was told sensation would return to her chest in about a year.

“I do not have any [sensation], except for nerve-damage pain that scatters across my chest like electricity,” she said.

Mosley said the medical industry neglected its “do no harm” duty when it came to her gender transition.

“What I don’t get is how he could look at me without a shirt on and see all the cuts on my body and decide it was okay to cut me more. I was seeking to destroy myself, and doctors helped me,” she said.

At 18 years old, Mosley, who was still struggling with anorexia, asked for liposuction but was denied the procedure because a doctor told her she couldn’t provide informed consent.

“I should have been able to get it because I was 18, but they said I wasn’t of sound mind. So how was I of sound mind to consent to the top surgery?” she said.

National Review has reviewed documents confirming that Mosley did in fact undergo a double mastectomy in addition to hormone injections and therapy but agreed not to name Mosley’s therapists and plastic surgeon to avoid interfering in potential future litigation.

Other medical professionals she consulted with also tried to steer her down the path of a hysterectomy, or uterus and ovary removal. Luckily, she said, she never pursued that. Just as much as the patients, Mosley said, the medical field is operating in a fantasyland when it comes to gender transition.

While she was on testosterone, she developed severe ovarian cysts that would periodically burst.

“I would go to the hospital, where they’d give me morphine, tell me it was normal for a trans man, and send me home,” she said.

Following her surgery, Mosley moved from North Carolina to Florida, where she met a “glitter family,” which she calls an ideologically aligned LGBT, mostly T, group of people who convince you that your native family does not love you because they aren’t sufficiently “affirming” of your choices. Mosley moved in with the family, and got engaged to one of the members, who identified as nonbinary, polyamorous, and bisexual. But after her fiancée wanted to bring a third into the relationship, Mosley left for Michigan at 22 years old.

Shortly after moving to Michigan, Mosley stopped testosterone and surgeries cold turkey. She underwent dialectical behavioral therapy, which she said healed her trauma and suicidal ideations.

“A huge weight was lifted off me. And I had this realization that I could have become not suicidal without mutilating my body,” she said.

Since then, most doctors have been unwilling to see Mosley, she said, claiming they don’t want her to be their detransitioner guinea pig. That reluctance to recognize detransitioners is fueling the false narrative among transgender activists that they don’t really exist except on the margins.

“There are no medical codes for detrans people. My paperwork says that I am a transgender person with severe atrophic post-menopausal vaginitis,” she said. “When people say only a small percentage of people detransition, you don’t know that. My papers say I’m a happy transgender person.”

While battered from years of abuse and mental torment, Mosley has found silver linings in unexpected places. In Michigan, while still presenting as a man, Mosley met her current boyfriend and his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

The toddler immediately clocked Mosley as a woman and started calling her “mommy,” despite her dressing and acting like a man, she said.

“At that moment I was like, ‘I know what I want.’”

Mosley is now fully detransitioned and lives as a woman.