Start Making Sense

Prisha Mosley is coming to terms with harm and building a new life

In her address to Fundamental Truths 2026, Mia Hughes called out the magical thinking at the heart of so-called “gender medicine.” “It is not possible to have a girl brain in a boy body, or vice versa. This is the absurd nonsense that we somehow allow to be taught to our children as if it’s fact.”

This same nonsense has become entrenched throughout the medical, therapeutic, and social work professions and is a significant factor in a widespread loss of confidence in political institutions. If it is hard for most of us to make any sense of it, it’s harder still for those who have been at its sharp end: the detransitioners who are living proof of the dangers of experimental gender medicine.

A Vulnerable Teen

Prisha Mosley (who tells part of her story in this interview) began identifying as trans at 15, and medicalised with testosterone at age 17. At 18, she had a double mastectomy.

Almost 10 years later, severe complications set in. For Prisha, it was the medical harm she had suffered, the adverse side effects and declining health, the sensation that she was “putting petrol into a diesel engine”, that set her on a journey to healing and her detox from gender ideology as a detransitioner.

Recovering meaning from needless physical trauma and delusional beliefs that have been affirmed by apparently trustworthy others is a tough task for detransitioners. It’s often a slow, uneven process that comes at great personal cost. It entails confronting a “possibility that is almost too awful to contemplate – that they have made a profound and irreversible mistake”.

Prisha has grappled with anxiety, depression, eating problems, and sexual assault that made her hate her body and plunged her into a black hole as a young teenager. And she is making sense of her lived experience of harm by dispassionately analysing and understanding the broader social context in which sexist stereotypes are still imposed (including by queer theorists) on young people and in which many women continue to suffer violence from men.

Prisha was sexually assaulted as a teenager. The resulting miscarriage made motherhood and womanhood unpalatable to her and engendered the feeling that she could only safely engage with men as a man. Sex, she thought, was something that happens to women, while men have sex because they want to. It need not be this way. As she says in this interview: “Gender is just a collection of sexist stereotypes. What we really are is male and female, and there’s no wrong way to be either of those things”. No one needs a medical intervention just to be themselves.

Making sense is about understanding reality and about creating meaning. Prisha has found meaning in her role as an advocate for detransitioners and, above all, as a mother. For her, moving beyond transition meant getting back her fertility. She’s a mother now who is grateful to experience the “joy, love, freedom, and happiness” she used to be afraid of: “I never thought I would be well or happy enough to want children or a family. Or even to be loved by a partner, and now I am.” She owes her motherhood to not being put on puberty blockers. But cross-sex hormones have taken a toll. Her pregnancy was high-risk. She suffers from pelvic floor atrophy. She is in constant pain and is sad that breastfeeding is not a possibility for her.

Prisha’s experiences also make nonsense of the informed consent model of “gender affirming care”. She was never concerned about fertility when she was transidentifying or being medicalised. She was, typically and developmentally, appropriate for her age, not interested in having children or breastfeeding. After her sexual assault, motherhood and womanhood were the last things on Prisha’s mind. As Mia Hughes puts it, the treatments euphemistically packaged as “gender affirming care” involve drastic, irreversible interventions, the meaning of which “no adolescent has the cognitive capacity to understand”.

There is No Sense in Lying

“All of us, at some point, believed the lie that humans can change sex,” says Prisha in this interview. The lie is reinforced by professionals who affirm the delusional beliefs of those suffering from gender dysphoria as factual truths, rather than acknowledging the experience of suffering as symptomatic of quite other conditions, stresses, and challenges. The lie is cemented by the false solidarity of a love bombing trans community that affirms all feelings but doubt. They told Prisha that “it made sense for her to feel as she did, because her body was wrong and that aligning her body with her brain and trying to look like a boy would cure all her mental health problems.” They demonised self-doubt and exploration as internalised transphobia: you think are you trans, therefore you are trans.

But certainty itself is frequently a symptom of mental disorder. “Few are more certain than the anorexic who insists she is fat and greedy. By contrast, psychologically healthy individuals tend to express doubt, nuance, and ambivalence,” says Stella O’Malley. Prisha’s feelings as a troubled teenager were immediately affirmed as proof of a trans identity. A “transgender expert” gave her a letter of recommendation for hormones and surgery, and she was immediately accepted for treatment by an endocrinologist and surgeon. No further questions were asked. Feelings are real. But when feelings alone become the touchstone of truth, we lose the capacity to shape our lives and see beyond the present moment.

The Nonsense is Intentional

Gender medicine is not grounded in reality but in a politics of social justice built on queer theory. It seeks to validate and exploit the fleeting feelings of children and young people as an expression of subversion for its own sake. It explicitly rejects the human capacity to act rationally, morally, and collectively to transform our material world. This is a failure of political imagination and an activism that seeks change for its own sake, no matter the human cost. If it means overriding biology, contradicting all existing knowledge about child and adolescent development, and robbing young people of their right to an open future, then so be it. “Progressive” politics must find a “dragon to slay, even if it must be invented”.

Prisha Mosley is grateful she can meet and stand up with other detransitioners at events like Genspect’s Detrans Awareness Day. Together, they are raising awareness of their stories and encouraging one another to live authentically, embracing both the suffering and the love, freedom, and happiness that life can bring. This is true solidarity. Prisha wishes there were more support for detransitioners. The institutions that rushed them towards harm are slow to provide the help they need. This makes the road to reclaiming “coherence, embodiment, and agency after medical transition” long and hard, but it’s a path that makes sense at last.

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