Planned Parenthood Prescribed Her Testosterone for Transition. The Side Effects Could've Killed Her.
Planned Parenthood handed Kate testosterone after a 30-min video call. Months later: seizures, rage, permanent voice loss. No screening, no follow-up—just refills. This isn’t care; it’s harm.
نظرة عامة
Kate Pond, a 25-year-old detransitioned woman, recounts how a 10–30 minute video call with Planned Parenthood in 2020 was all it took to be prescribed testosterone. Within months she suffered rage, depersonalization, a seizure, and permanent vocal damage. No one screened her for autism, ADHD, depression, or her chaotic home life, and staff urged her to “stay on it” despite worsening side effects.
ملخص الفيديو الكامل
Kate Pond, a 25-year-old detransitioned woman, describes how a single 10-to-30-minute video call with Planned Parenthood in 2020 was all it took to be prescribed testosterone. Living in California and working at a coffee shop during the COVID lockdown, Kate had spent her teens on Tumblr and in high-school Gay-Straight Alliance circles where 60–70 % of students identified as LGBTQ+. After telling the clinician she was “trans” and wanted “hormone replacement therapy,” she received a gel formulation that she applied daily to her arms for six-to-eight months. No one ever asked about her autism, ADHD, existing depression, or the chaotic home life that had driven her online for escape; Planned Parenthood never followed up unless she called first. Within weeks Kate’s voice began to drop, dark body hair appeared, and she experienced bouts of rage so intense she “did not know how to let it out.” She also developed depersonalization and derealization—“you literally feel like you’re not in your body and the world around you isn’t real”—and suffered a 30-second seizure while scrolling TikTok, followed by a panic attack. When she reported the patch allergy, mood worsening, and seizure-like episode, staff urged her to “stay on it longer to see if you still feel this way,” switched her to gel, and continued refills without labs until Kate herself requested bloodwork. The realization that her singing voice was permanently deepening—she had been a children’s-choir soprano—became a daily source of dread: “Every single day that I put the gel on my arms I was like, is this the day my voice is going to drop and I can’t go back?” Detransition began when Kate stumbled on online detrans content, including the interviewer’s videos, and asked why her dysphoria had not improved even as her body masculinized. She quietly stopped testosterone, changed her Instagram handle back to her birth name, and told friends she was “just a woman again.” Several responded, “You were never really trans,” and drifted away; others still use her former male name even while accepting “she/her.” Kate never legally changed her name, sparing her an extra bureaucratic reversal, and in 2022 she phoned Planned Parenthood to report she had discontinued testosterone. The receptionist insisted, “You’ve been on this ever since this date, and you’re still on it, right?”—illustrating, Kate says, how little oversight the chain provides once hormones are dispensed. Today Kate believes “there are only two genders, male and female, with eight billion different expressions of them.” She urges anyone considering transition to research “every single side of the ideological spectrum,” not just the affirming narratives that flooded her Tumblr feed, and she thinks Planned Parenthood “has no business going into the trans business” and should be held accountable for handing out hormones with minimal screening. Her own story, she hopes, will serve as a counterweight to the online chorus that told a 13-year-old autistic girl uncomfortable with puberty that those feelings meant she was literally a boy.