Daughter with Severe Mental Health Issues Gets Hormones at First Appointment with Planned Parenthood

This is a transcript of a Partners for Ethical Care (PEC) parent story. The original version can be found here, and the podcast version can be found here, as part of PEC’s podcast series, “The Witness: True Stories of Children and Gender Identity.

Thank you for the chance to share my story, which I hope will primarily highlight the grave disservice that Planned Parenthood is doing to young women in these confused times.

My now-21-year-old daughter (whom I’ll call Allison) had spent her childhood happily engaging in what one would call typical girly activities, with no gender-stereotyping encouragement from me at all.

That continued even after the onset of a mental-health issue in high school. She seemed to have things under control when she moved far away for college. The environment of her new city and her university was gender-nonconforming and pro-transgender-identities, and she began speaking to us by phone of being “non-binary,” which I naively took to mean something like bisexual.

Then her anxiety and depression came back to overwhelm her. She dropped out of college and moved back to our home town, resuming care from her original psychiatrist.

Allison’s appearance, always feminine and done to the nines, had changed dramatically. A shaved head, boys’ clothes, and obvious unhappiness were now her camouflage from the world.

She went from non-binary to claiming that she was really a boy. As I learned later, her explanation matched the online transgender “coaching” that’s designed to rebut the traditional diagnostic criteria of persistent, insistent, consistent behavior:

“I always knew something was wrong but didn’t have words for it until I started watching videos on Tumblr and YouTube.” “When I was little, I was afraid to tell you that I didn’t feel right.”

This was alarming, of course, and matched absolutely nothing about her past—but still I was naïve. Because her psychiatrist did not consider her to be transgender, I assumed Allison would be unable to get a referral for the testosterone she was almost frantically determined to start.

I was wrong. Planned Parenthood will see someone exactly one time—oh and do a smidgen of blood work—before cheerfully enabling young women (and young men) to pursue their “authentic” selves through cross-sex hormones. All that’s needed is a few bucks and signing a form saying that the risks have been disclosed and understood.

That is the route my Allison took, bypassing her psychiatrist altogether.

My husband sent Planned Parenthood a certified letter that explained her mental-health history and provided her doctor’s name and telephone number. Planned Parenthood’s lawyer wrote back that they presume anyone over 18 is capable of giving informed consent, thank you very much.

This is a grave travesty. No matter what anyone thinks of Planned Parenthood’s other services, the fact that they will instantly prescribe powerful hormones with many unknown long-term effects to people with underlying mental-health issues should shock the conscience. People need to know that this is happening.