Detransition Lawsuit Against Planned Parenthood
“Love does no harm to a neighbor. Romans 13:10”
When she was a teenager, Cristina Hineman started testosterone after a 30-minute consult at Planned Parenthood. She’s now suing them. Read the Complaint: Hineman v. Planned Parenthood 4-23-24
‘I regretted everything.’
Below are excerpts from the Free Press article by Jennifer Block.
Speedy and Careless “Treatment”
Faced with her parents’ skepticism, Hineman waited to make an appointment for just after her 18th birthday in November 2021 at the Planned Parenthood in Hudson, NY. Some clinics offer hormones starting at age 16 with parental approval, but as a legal adult Hineman wouldn’t need their consent.
After she filled out forms in the Planned Parenthood waiting room, a nurse led her to an exam room and handed her a consent form for “masculinizing hormone therapy.”
Records show that a nurse practitioner asked about Hineman’s identity and desires; she noted that “patient has consulted with a mental health provider”—meaning Hineman had previously talked to therapists. The two discussed the “expected changes” related to testosterone—growing a beard and body hair, deepening voice, and that “changes to fertility may be permanent or reversible.”
Then the first nurse took Hineman’s blood, and she was given a prescription for testosterone gel.
She remembers all this taking under 30 minutes.
Like many others in the rising wave of female teens seeking to masculinize, she had been battling a cluster of mental health problems: self-harm, depression, and anxiety. Also like many of these teens, Hineman has autism.
Just over a year into treatment, Hineman realized she had made a terrible mistake, and that gender was not the source of her problems.
“I was brainwashed,” she says now. “A lot of people say that adults should be able to do whatever they want. But if you have mental illness that’s clouding your view, or you’re so misinformed about what gender dysphoria even means, then you cannot consent to such invasive treatments.”
Hineman, who went from identifying as “nonbinary” to “agender” to “trans” over the course of a year, now considers herself a “detransitioner”—someone who, if possible, has returned to living as their birth sex, often with medical side effects.
Speedy Treatment Guidelines
Planned Parenthood medical guidelines are made by the national headquarters.
“Like any franchise, you know what to expect in whatever affiliate you go to because they’re all practicing by the same standards and guidelines,” Dr. Paul Blumenthal, an emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and former chair of Planned Parenthood’s National Medical Committee.
These guidelines allow for speedy access to life-altering hormones. As evident in one affiliate’s Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy Patient Handbook: “Most of our patients can get a hormone prescription at the end of their first visit with us.”
First Detransitioner Lawsuit Against Planned Parenthood
Today, reported exclusively in The Free Press, she is a plaintiff in the first detransitioner lawsuit against Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In the medical malpractice suit, filed in April, she’s seeking unspecified damages for negligence and failure to obtain informed consent from all the health providers—including those at Planned Parenthood—who facilitated her medical transition: from therapists who “encouraged” her desire to change genders, to the plastic surgeon who removed her breasts after a superficial consult when she turned 19, to the nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood who wrote Hineman the prescription for testosterone. (In June, Planned Parenthood filed its answer to the complaint, disputing Hineman’s claims.)
Lifetime of Regret
The last time she went to Planned Parenthood in March of 2023, Hineman, then 19, held back tears as she told the nurse practitioner she had come to realize, with horror that still grips her, that it all had been a mistake.
The consent form Hineman had signed stated, “You can choose to stop taking testosterone at any time. If you decide to do that, talk to your doctor or nurse.” But Hineman discovered there was no protocol for stopping, no handout. Her clinician had no advice except to contact a gender therapist. Hineman left a voicemail but said she never got a return call.
The week before, she’d had her final post-op appointment with the surgeon who removed her breasts. When the bandages came off, she hated what she saw. She had sought surgery believing this was “the only way” to make the “crippling feeling” of suicidal depression go away. It’s what she’d been told “over and over and over again” on the internet, by medical professionals and YouTubers alike.
But the next night she had “the biggest anxiety attack of my entire life.” She called for her mother to comfort her, and cried so hard she threw up. “I regretted everything,” she tells me. She was overwhelmed with the thought that “I’m never going to look like a woman again, I’m never going to have feeling back in my chest.”
The next day was a scheduled testosterone “injection day,” but instead of plunging a needle in her belly, she shaved her legs and put on a red dress with long sleeves that hid her biceps. She announced the change in an Instagram post that said, “I’m going by she/her pronouns again.”
Anna also looks back with bafflement that her depression and other medical factors didn’t give providers pause. “I was lost. I was hurting. I was a fucked-up teen who needed help,” she told me.
Hineman now regrets that she put off college to transition, and spent her life savings, about $9,000, on a mastectomy. She has gone public because she wants young people like herself, their parents, and the providers who are pushing ideology over good care to know that there are safe and humane ways to address the kind of distress she suffered.
“The answers are not just transition or suicide. There are ways to work through these feelings without altering your body,” she says.
Other Lawsuits Against Perpetrators
You can read about all the other lawsuits here.
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