National Review
Sexually Abused by Her Father, Teen Sought Help but Was Steered into Medical Transition
Left: Evie began self-harming at age eleven. Right: At 18, Evie began experiencing significant physical side effects from testosterone treatment.(Courtesy of Evie)
By CAROLINE DOWNEY
June 15, 2023 6:30 AM
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment in a series on individuals who have “detransitioned” in the wake of gender-related medical interventions. Read the first three installments here. Warning: The following article contains a graphic photo of the subject’s torso, taken after she received a mastectomy. Reader discretion is advised.
Raised by a father who was a raging alcoholic and a mother struggling with health issues, Evelyn had a chaotic childhood in San Diego.
“I remember the first time I told my mom I was suicidal,” Evelyn, 19, who goes by “Evie,” told National Review. “I was nine years old, and it was after I tried to hang myself with a scarf in my room. After that, it was all downhill.”
Evie’s spiral, she said, can be traced to the heinous abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. By the time she was four years old, he was drinking two bottles of vodka every day.
“It was very violent,” she said. “It would get worse and worse and worse.”
He started with under-the-covers, over-the-clothes touching when she was a toddler. By the time she was five, the abuse had escalated to penetrative rape. With each year, he became more aggressive. The molestation was daily by the time she was seven. Evie’s mother, unaware of the abuse, was frequently in the hospital for illness, so Evie was left alone with her father for weeks on end.
“At one point, he would take me to the bar with him, and just have me sit outside while he was inside drinking,” Evie said. “If he got the urges to do whatever, he’d bring me inside and molest me in the bathroom at the bar.” Her father later committed suicide.
When she was eleven years old, Evie was admitted to a residential treatment facility for extremely emotionally disturbed children, where she met a transgender person for the first time. An inpatient psychiatrist told Evie that many girls who suffered trauma when they were young develop gender dysphoria, and that it was normal, she said.
“They definitely put the idea in my head,” she said. “It had never occurred to me. I wasn’t one of those kids saying, ‘I want to be a boy’ when I was like four.”
A couple months after she was discharged, Evie came out as transgender at age twelve. She told her mom that she wanted to go by “Evan” and started using he/him pronouns at home, but she didn’t tell her friends or her school. Evie intentionally neglected her waist-length hair, keeping it matted and knotted, to convince her mom to let her cut it.
Evie’s story is not unique: A host of scientific studies confirm that children who experience sexual abuse are more likely to begin identifying as transgender.
Throughout early adolescence, Evie was in and out of mental hospitals for self-harming. She started cutting with scissors when she was eleven. “I upgraded to pencil-sharpener blades when I was twelve,” she said. She was put on Prozac for depression.
After trying on a masculine identity for a few months, Evie decided she probably wasn’t trans, although she wondered whether she was a lesbian. “I was extremely confused,” she said.
By 13, Evie had been in and out of inpatient centers 13 times. She had been admitted to two separate group homes and was on the way to her third due to her worsening mental state. At 13, she started taking a medication called Abilify for depression, which caused her to gain 40 pounds in three months. Appalled by her sudden weight gain, Evie developed anorexia.
“I had always been kind of skinny when I was little,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m literally obese.’” She went to another inpatient facility for her eating disorder.
After her stint in the inpatient facility, Evie was admitted into a Level 14 residential group home, called Oasis, in Arizona. Level 14 is the highest security level, with 24-hour supervision.
“It’s like a prison for mentally ill kids,” she said. “It’s for kids who are at risk of running away, such as those who have broken out before, or kids who have tried to attempt [suicide] in the mental hospital. I had a history of trying to attempt in mental hospitals.”
Evie was moved to Oasis after the last psychiatric ward she was housed in discovered she was “cheeking” her medication.
“I would hide the pills under my tongue and then spit them out in my room and hide them,” she said. “I was stashing them to try to overdose.”
At Oasis, Evie came out as transgender for a second time.
“I started experimenting with binding,” she said. “I had sports bras, and I would stack three of them on top of each other and then tuck my boobs in a way so that they looked flat. That was horrible. I couldn’t do that for more than like a few hours. I would get out of breath. It would feel like I was being suffocated.”
The staff wanted to place Evie in the boy’s ward of Oasis. “I was all for it,” she said, but her mother rejected that idea outright due to concerns about her daughter’s safety.
Evie’s second trans phase lasted six months, and then she reverted to being a girl again. “It was very flip floppy with me,” she said.
After Oasis, Evie remained stable, and even attended a small private school, where she thrived for a while.
“I wasn’t going back to the mental hospitals,” she said. “I was staying out of the group homes. I wasn’t self-harming. I was confident in my identity as a girl.”
But Evie was still looking for community. At 15, she started hanging out at the Hillcrest Youth Center, an LGBT club for teens aged twelve to 18 in San Diego. “You could go in there and talk to gay and trans kids,” she said. Evie identified as bisexual at the time.
There, Evie met a 19-year-old man who identified as a woman. He was allowed to be there despite his age because he was close friends with the coordinator.
“He immediately took interest in me,” she said. “He was overly friendly. He wanted to hang out with me all the time. He’d bring me gifts, like candy or my favorite soda. We exchanged numbers because I thought he was cool. I didn’t really see any negative intent. I was ignorant. He went off the rails from there.”
The man pursued Evie obsessively, making creepy sexual comments and communicating with her constantly. He wrote Evie a poem about masturbation and sent it to her.
“He would talk all the time about wanting to meet up when my mom wasn’t around,” she said. “He would try to kiss me whenever I went to the youth center. He would be very touchy, playing with my hair, rubbing my shoulders.”
When Evie brought her concerns to the youth leader, she deflected by saying she’d never had bad experiences with him. She refused to kick him out unless Evie could provide proof of misconduct, she said. Hillcrest Youth Center did not respond to request for comment.
“I didn’t feel safe there knowing there were no adults looking out for us,” so Evie stopped going to HYC.
Having lost her support group, however, Evie became mentally unstable again. Her HYC friends were angry at her for speaking out.
“They said, ‘These are the stereotypes. It’s not good to accuse trans women of being predators.’ They basically called me a bigot for telling this lady what was happening,” Evie added.
For the first time in a year and a half, Evie was readmitted back into an inpatient ward. She came out as transgender for a third time, with a “renewed sense of vigor.” Her mom wasn’t having it, though, claiming she was crying wolf.
Evie went behind her mom’s back and told everyone at school to address her using male pronouns and to call her “Evan.” She bought a real chest binder, which she’d smuggle into her backpack and wear all day at school.
Eventually, her mom relented and took her to a small private-practice gender specialist. The therapist, named Cristy Mereles, told Evie that she had chest dysphoria, “which, looking back on it, was definitely just the anorexia,” she said. A 36-almost-D cup at just 15, Evie hated her chest.
After a few casual sessions with the therapist, Mereles diagnosed Evie with gender dysphoria. Mereles referred Evie to a pediatrician, named Dr. Rachel Gianfortune, who prescribed hormone therapy for minors, she said.
Gianfortune and Mereles did not respond to requests for comment.
A few weeks shy of her 16th birthday, Evie got her first testosterone prescription. “She immediately put me on the highest dose for someone my age,” she said of Gianfortune. “She said because of my weight and how tall I was, she’d start me on the highest dose, which was 200 mg.”
Evie received the intravenous injections once a month at first. By the time she was 17, she received them twice a month.
A soprano II in choir as a child, Evie always had a high-pitched voice. She immediately noticed her voice dropping while taking T.
“I was happy at the time because I was like, ‘Oh it makes me sound more manly,’” she said. “While I was on it, I saw no issues with what was changing. I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t care whether it was temporary or permanent. As long as I was taking it, I was happy.”
At 16, she brought up the idea of top surgery. Her mom recommended a breast reduction instead, but the therapists egged Evie on and promised to help her get a referral for a double mastectomy, she said. “They were almost pushing it on me,” she said.
In May 2021, Evie had the procedure. At the orientation, a doctor poorly explained what he was going to do, she said. A nurse mentioned that, if for whatever reason she didn’t like the result, she could have implants put in.
“I found out years later that’s completely false,” she said. “They flat-out lied to me. There’s not enough skin on my chest to have implants. They were explaining that it’s very low risk, they never have any complications.”
A few weeks after the operation, Evie developed a bad infection in the areas of her removed breasts where Jackson-Pratt drains — devices that collect bodily fluids from surgical sites — had been installed.
“There was puss going into my lungs,” she said. “I had to be admitted into the ER because I was in the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. Both locations were super inflamed, they were leaking pus, my chest was swollen, I could barely breathe.” While in intensive care for two weeks, the doctors told Evie that the infection could have been life-threatening if she hadn’t caught it when she did.
“I could have drowned in my own pus,” she said. While healing, Evie wore a compression binder because doctors told her there was a risk her nipples could fall off if she didn’t.
“I know people personally who that happened to,” she said.
National Review has obtained medical documents confirming that Evie received testosterone and a double mastectomy, though Evie declined to provide the name of the surgeon who performed the mastectomy.
Evie developed a severe lung infection after undergoing a double mastectomy. (Courtesy of Evie)
At 18, Evie and her mom moved to Brooklyn. She was hit with an avalanche of physical side effects from the transition. Her hair started falling out in chunks, for instance.
“My hair line was moving back really far,” he said. “I had bald spots all over my head, which you can imagine is very humiliating as an 18-year-old. My body hair started coming in way thicker. My voice didn’t go back to normal like they said it would.”
The binding, which she’d routinely do for hours longer than recommended, ruined her ribs. Now, the top two ribs flare out.
“I get really bad chest tightness,” she said. When I was skinnier, it would hurt when I raised my arms. I could feel my ribs grinding against my skin.”
In New York City, there was a supply shortage of testosterone, so Evie was unable to get refills.
“As soon as I stopped taking it, my brain cleared,” she said. With mental clarity, Evie reflected on her horrendous transition experience. At 19, Evie met a boy, who is now her boyfriend, online. Despite Evie’s full mustache, sharper jaw, and masculine feature, “he had a connection with me emotionally,” she said.
“It was almost like he subconsciously knew I was a woman,” she said. A few weeks after they met, Evie went back to going by “Evelyn” and using she/her pronouns.
While taking testosterone, Evie experienced menopause-like symptoms, such as a paused period and hot flashes. “I was convinced I was infertile,” she said. “Doctors told me I had a one in 10,000 chance of conceiving. It was going to be very difficult considering the damage testosterone did to me.”
Eight weeks ago, Evie learned that she’s expecting.
“It’s a little bittersweet knowing I won’t be able to breastfeed my child,” she added. “But it’s the fact that I’m able to carry one in the first place that’s exciting for me. Everybody told me it was impossible.”
Today, Evie is eight months into detransitioning. She’s committed to raising her child in a way that is insulated from the gender craze, including coercive therapists and peer-pressuring friend groups. “I would die before I let my kid go through that,” she said. She also vows to never let the medical field gaslight her the way her mom was.
The transition process was riddled with misinformation and fearmongering, she said. Evie remembers a specific session with the gender specialist, who told her mom, “You can’t dangle [testosterone] in front of him like a carrot in front of a horse.” Her mom was often afraid authorities would take Evie away from her, she said.
“She had no idea what they were capable of doing if she denied certain aspects of transition,” she said. “The rhetoric of ‘dead daughter or trans kid.’ It’s real. They actually say that to you.”
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