An Open Letter to the Surgeon Who Removed My Breasts

On the anniversary of my mastectomy

William Alan Dulin,

Before I begin, let it be clear that I will not honor you with the title of “doctor.” A doctor is a healer, a protector of life and health who adheres to the sacred oath of doing no harm. You are a sick man who used a medical degree as permission to disfigure children, and I refuse to grant you a title you have so thoroughly disgraced.

Until you were stopped by the passage of Texas’s SB14 in 2023, you were prolific in the field of ideologically driven child mutilation. You, a single man, were third on the list of institutions who billed the most to private insurance companies for pediatric transgender surgeries between 2016-2022, competing with major institutions like Boston Children’s Hospital and New York University Medical Center. You turned the destruction of children’s healthy bodies into a high-volume business.

I have lived every day for the last seven years with the physical and psychological wreckage you left behind. When I was fourteen years old, you took a scalpel to my healthy body and amputated my breasts.

I didn’t have the capacity to understand the permanence of what you were doing to me. I didn’t have the foresight to know what it would feel like to reach adulthood and realize that my future and my bodily integrity had been stripped away before I even reached high school. But you did. You were an adult. You were the “expert.” You were the one who held the oath to do no harm.

What is most sickening, what keeps me awake with a rage I can barely contain, is the fact that you are a father. You have daughters of your own. When you look at them, do you see flesh to be cut or a human being to be protected? Did your wife nurse those children? Did you watch that bond, that fundamental mammalian experience, and then decide it was a responsible choice to steal that future from a fourteen-year-old girl?

How do you look at your own children and then walk into an operating room to perform such a violent, irreversible procedure on someone else’s little girl? What does a man like you say to your wife when she asks you how your day was?

I want you to know the reality of the “success” you had on that operating table. I had to watch as the skin of my nipples, which you had sliced off, defatted, and then grafted back onto my skin, turned black and fell off my body. I was a child, and parts of me were literally rotting because of your ego. Now, I live every single day with a numb, hollow chest covered in the disfiguring scars you chose to carve into me. I’m left to cope with the constant, agonizing reminders of the damage you inflicted. There is an electrical current that constantly hums and zaps beneath my skin, a manifestation of the trauma you inflicted and sewed into my nerves.

You stole my girlhood. You killed the woman I was supposed to become. You took advantage of a little girl’s confusion and a family’s trust to perform an unnecessary, disfiguring surgery on a child who was barely through puberty. You committed an act of violence that I have to wear on my skin for the rest of my life.

I am no longer that silent, vulnerable fourteen-year-old. I am a woman living in the wreckage of your carelessness, and I will spend the rest of my life ensuring that people know exactly what kind of “medicine” you practiced.

I have made quite a name for myself, ensuring that you are never forgotten. I have already publicly named you in front of the Federal Trade Commission and the United States Senate. I have spoken your name into the record so that it is preserved in the halls of power as a warning. Your name will go down in history right next to mine as the man who forced me to find my voice by trying to destroy my body. The whole world will know what you did. I will make sure of it.

I hope every time you look at your daughters, you are haunted by the faces of the children you broke. You should never have been allowed near a surgical suite, let alone a child.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.