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Survivors of gender ideology describe how Planned Parenthood harmed them

IssuesIssues·By Sheena Rodriguez

Survivors of gender ideology describe how Planned Parenthood harmed them

Detransitioners are exposing how sex-rejecting practices promoted and administered by Planned Parenthood and others continue to harm the vulnerable.

As more of these individuals come forward to tell their stories, gender ideology is exposed as harmful and predatory. Compassionate doctors aim to help survivors heal from the bodily harm caused by medicalized gender fraud.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Health and Human Services report, "Wolves in White Coats," contains interviews with several individuals impacted by medicalized gender ideology.

  • Luke Healy and Elizabeth Edens were two such individuals who shared how Planned Parenthood and others inflicted harm upon them by perpetuating the idea that they were born in the 'wrong' bodies.

  • One of the doctors seeking to help detransitioners, Dr. Katy Hurd, once struggled with her own gender identity, and has now joined the Resilience Health Network. She hopes to open a brick and mortar and telehealth clinic for people seeking healing after undergoing sex-rejecting interventions. 

  • Planned Parenthood, the self-proclaimed leader in ‘gender affirming care,’ continues to receive full access to federal Medicaid funding.   

In The Spotlight:      

Luke Healy 

A report recently released by Health and Human Services (HHS), “Wolves in White Coats,” detailed first-hand accounts and interview responses from those impacted by medicalized gender ideology.

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One of those testimonies was that of Luke Healy. According to the report, Luke was just 10 years old when he was first subjected to gender ideology. What began as “ordinary childhood interests” such as anime fantasy and “internet fandoms,” quickly progressed into exposure to “online communities where adults and older peers discussed sex, pornography, homosexuality, and transgender identity with children.” 

By age 13, Healy claims he had been “groomed” into believing he was “in the wrong body.” When his concerned parents sought help for their son, institutional “experts” were quick to erroneously affirm his distorted identity — part of “social transitioning.”

Healy’s experience is not an isolated one. Live Action’s recent report explained how gender-ideologues like Planned Parenthood help to push individuals from one “intervention” to the next, through multiple stages: 

  • Ideological ‘Grooming’: May include exposure to desensitizing and dehumanizing sexualized content and ideas — often contrary to reality — such as the intentional fracturing of gender from biological sex, erroneously suggesting that biological sex is a fluid concept. 

  • Social Interventions: May include using pronouns contrary to a person’s biological reality. May also include physically restricting practices to appear more masculine or feminine – in contradiction to one’s biological sex – such as breast binding or genital tucking. 

  • Medical Interventions: May include off-label use of sex hormones for the purpose of feminizing or masculinizing, contrary to the person’s biological sex; the medically unnecessary use of puberty blockers; and medically unnecessary body-harming surgeries for the purpose of appearing more masculine or feminine contrary to one's biological sex.  

Though Healy’s parents refused to allow him to take puberty blockers or feminizing hormones while he was a minor, at age 18, he began taking estrogen obtained from Planned Parenthood and other suppliers. This continued for several years.    

Healy says the hormones failed to relieve his distress and instead made him feel “like a stranger in his own skin.” He even considered body-altering surgeries but said he “was being sold procedures, not psychological help,” and reported that the consultations only "deepened his doubts.”

Live Action News has reported that Planned Parenthood boasts of referring for these types of body-harming surgeries, and along with other sex-rejecting services, does so often without professional psychological assessment through its “informed consent” model. 

After Healy began to combat his substance abuse to rebuild his life, he began to recognize “the same obsessive, destructive patter in gender ideology that he had seen in addiction.” He reported that he knew “he was not a woman before he knew how to stop living as one.”

Eventually, Healy said he began listening to “... a Catholic priest online and confronting the spiritual and psychological reality of what he was doing,” that led to him cutting his hair, bringing his identity in alignment with his biological reality, and he “never looked back.”     

The HHS report concluded Healy’s testimony, stating (emphasis added): 

Today, Luke argues that the institutions involved in his case did not investigate the causes of his distress, but instead pushed a false identity and directed him toward increasingly invasive interventions.

His account raises serious concerns about online grooming, sex-rejection-only counseling, informed-consent hormone access for vulnerable young adults, and the broader medical and political system that treats these interventions as routine while dismissing those who later regret them.

Elizabeth Edens

Elizabeth Edens is a mother and ‘post-detransitioner’ who began medicalized transition interventions at age 19, leading to body-harming surgery.

In a recent article, Edens revealed that Planned Parenthood was a provider of the masculinizing hormones she used. Edens claims that the Planned Parenthood doctor was “very dismissive and defensive” when she brought up side effects of taking testosterone.

“‘Well, that’s why they are controlled substances now, isn’t it?’ she hissed, unable to contain her contempt for me. As if her practice [Planned Parenthood] hadn’t been the one supplying me with it months earlier!”    

Edens explained:

“I was surprised, still operating under the assumption that the doctors had been genuine when they said they wanted to help me while offering me transition. It would take three or four more experiences of such poor treatment for me to fully understand that their intention had never really been to learn the truth about symptoms.”

She underwent a medically unnecessary mastectomy, which she stated was brought about by “gender medicine” and left her feeling “tricked by the medical field.” 

“Nobody told me that the possible side effects would be completely life-altering and changing,” Edens wrote

Edens refers to herself and other post-detransitioners as “survivors of gender affirmation medicine” or SGAM, further stating:     

Any survivor reading this will know that this requires psychological strength in a way that living as a trans person does not. Trans ideology says, “I feel vaguely uncomfortable with the way that God made me, the way that I came into this earth, the way I was born from my mother.” And then it says, “It’s okay to not face that feeling. It’s okay to run away from it using every maladaptive coping skill you can.

But, as you know, when we break out of that mentality and detransition, we not only face up to the original pain and grief surrounding the wish not to have been born the sex we were, but we also mourn things that were altered about our bodies in traumatic, destructive ways.

That is a real grief and a real feeling. Trans ideology told us that simply disliking things about the way you were born was reason enough to feel suicidal, but it held out the promise that we could change them. 

We have to be stronger than that. We have to accept the things that there are things we can’t change.

The Long Haul:

Live Action News has consistently exposed first-hand accounts from detransitioners, revealing how Planned Parenthood distributed sex-rejecting hormones or blockers even when young individuals explicitly detailed their battles with psychological distress, self-harm ideation, and the trauma of sexual exploitation.

Rather than investigating the underlying origins of a person’s suffering, sex-rejecting institutional providers like Planned Parenthood have utilized deceptive tactics on vulnerable populations in need of genuine and compassionate healthcare.

While Planned Parenthood and others continue to inflict harm, some doctors and professionals are committed to finding ways to help detransitioners on a path toward healing. 

Earlier this year during a Genspect “Detrans Awareness Day 2026” conference, Dr. Katy Hurd shared some of her experiences treating patients a few years ago in an emergency care walk-in clinic near Seattle, Washington, where she began to see the widespread impacts that medicalized “gender-affirming” ideology was having on vulnerable populations. 

During a panel discussion, Hurd recalled that one of the first patients she saw with negative impacts of sex-rejecting “care” was a mostly non-verbal, 17-year-old female with severe autism who was suffering from unexplained chest pain after being on testosterone for several years.

From that moment, several other patients came in the clinic seeking healing from damage done from sex-rejecting practices like life-altering hormones and body-harming surgeries. Hurd, who herself struggled with gender identity early on in life, joined the Resilience Health Network and aims to open a brick and mortar and telehealth clinic for people seeking healing after undergoing sex-rejecting interventions. 

“The good news is that there is health and healing available… but it’s a long haul,” Hurd continued, but it is doctors like Hurd that are helping to make patients like Elizabeth Edens find hope, healing, and the feeling of being heard. 

Edens wrote:

After years of disappointment, and having finally met some doctors who truly believe in “do no harm,” I find my defensive shield against all physicians has begun to soften…

It was shocking how new and different it felt to be listened to, first by Dr. Hurd, and then by the specialist she connected me with. There are still physicians who honor their Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm, and are horrified by the ways medicine has hurt vulnerable people.

Why It Matters: 

The sex-rejecting, medicalized “ideological beast” is not rampant throughout most major institutions and is often perpetrated by taxpayer-subsidized groups and clinics like Planned Parenthood.

While these ideological practices continue to inflict life-altering physical, emotional, and psychological harms — in addition to multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates facing serious allegations of fraudulent activity by HHS — the self-proclaimed leader in ‘gender affirming care’ continues to receive full access to federal Medicaid funding.   

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