In one of a growing number of malpractice lawsuits, a 21-year-old woman claims doctors at the University of Nebraska Medical Center mistreated her gender dysphoria, then performed a double mastectomy as a first step in her “transition” to being a man.
Filed by the Center for American Liberty, the lawsuit accuses doctors of “tunnel vision” in providing “gender-affirming” care instead of treating teenager Luka Hein’s obvious psychiatric difficulties.
And importantly, the lawsuit is also a brief against “gender-affirming treatment” in general, including hormonal treatments and mutilation surgeries that cannot change a person’s “gender.”
Apparently, lawsuits will be the only thing that stop doctors and hospitals from offering “gender-affirming” treatment, particularly to children.
The Lawsuit
Doctors at the hospital followed something called the “Dutch Protocol” to evaluate Hein. The protocol, the lawsuit alleges, is “based on a poorly designed study of transgender patients who received puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and/or surgery in the early 2000’s.”
A pharmaceutical company that marketed puberty blockers funded the study. The “low-quality Dutch study ‘should have never been used’ as justification to scale up the protocol for general use,” the lawsuit alleges.
The “gender-affirming care,” the lawsuit alleges, relied on Hein’s self-diagnosis.
“Defendants owe a duty of care to independently examine and assess patients, utilizing objective tests, and ruling out other potential causes of a patient’s pain before resorting to irreversible procedures like double mastectomy or hysterectomy,” the lawsuit alleges. “Defendants, and each of them, were negligent in failing to question Luka’s self-diagnosis, instead ‘affirming’ her toward irreversible chemical and surgical solutions.”
That first solution, amputating her breasts when she “was incapable of understanding the lasting consequences of her decision, constitutes negligence for which Defendants are jointly and severally liable.”
Hein, you see, was in deep psychological trouble:
In 2015, when Luka was 13 years-old [sic], her world was upended by the divorce of her parents. Splitting time between two households, life became chaotic. She often felt like she was in the middle of it all and began to question who she was.
By 2016, Luka was really struggling in school. She could not concentrate and lost motivation. Anxiety and panic attacks immobilized her. She lost her appetite, became easily angered, started cutting, and expressed suicidal ideation. She began counseling with a therapist and a psychiatrist who diagnosed depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Her psychiatrist put her on antipsychotic medication, but she continued to spiral downward.
Her condition worsened in 2017. When an online pervert groomed and traumatized her, she landed in psychiatric intensive care.
That’s when she began the self-diagnosis that led doctors to chop off her breasts, the lawsuit alleges:
There were additional complicating factors that impacted Luka’s mental health. When she entered puberty, she hated menses and was extremely uncomfortable with her developing breasts. Traumatized by the dangerous online encounter, Luka wondered whether it would be best to have no breasts at all. She started researching matters of sexuality online and found transgender influencers who extolled the virtues of hormones and surgery. She ordered a chest binder, transferred from an all-girls school, and changed her name. She began identifying as male and advised her mental health providers, and her parents, that she was transgender. Due to what she had learned online, she believed “top surgery”, i.e., having her breasts surgically removed, would ease her mental distress.
Breast Removal
A pro-tranny headshrinker pushed her to become “transgender,” the lawsuit alleges, by encouraging her to join a homosexual support group and discussing “chest-binding.” She found “more information about transgender people and began reading and listening to their stories.”
On her “very first visit” to the “gender clinic” at UNMC, doctors planned “top surgery.” She was just 16 when doctors lopped off her breasts. Then came testosterone shots, and a recommendation for a hysterectomy, which her parents wisely refused.
Thus were doctors negligent on the following grounds, the lawsuit alleges:
Defendants were negligent in recommending and/or performing breast surgery while Luka was suffering from significant psychosocial comorbidities and had not first been placed on testosterone for a minimum of one year. …
Defendants were negligent in failing to disclose to Luka and her parents that the studies supporting “affirming care” are methodologically weak, ideologically slanted and of poor academic quality. …
Defendants were negligent in failing to adequately disclose, discuss with, or warn Luka and her parents that most trans-identifying teens desist (i.e., no longer identify as transgender) by the time they are through adolescence.
As well, doctors failed to inform Hein that the mental health of “transgenders” worsens after surgery and hormone treatment.
Now, as the lawsuit avers, Hein will never breastfeed her future children.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
Other Lawsuits, Proper Treatment
Luka Hein isn’t the only victim of ideologically driven medicine controlled by pro-”transgender” crackpots.
In February, the center sued on behalf of Chloe Brockman (aka Chloe Cole), another victim of breast-chopping doctors. Again, they relied on her own self-diagnosis after she watched crazy “transgender influencers” on social media for “hours at time.”
Lawsuits appear to be the only answer to the burgeoning industry of mutilation surgeries and chemical castration with hormones, the exactly wrong treatments for “gender dysphoria,” says Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatry professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University.
“Gender dysphoria” is akin to anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder, he says.
“Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction,” he wrote in 2015:
The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.
Yet surgeons and psychiatrists are rushing clearly mentally ill kids such as Hein and Brockman into mastectomies and other-life altering treatments.
That is why 20 states restrict or forbid doctors from practicing the quackery on minors.
