On June 3, Prisha Mosley, 26, gave birth to a healthy baby boy via C-section.
That may not seem all that unusual for a young woman of childbearing age, but until about two years ago, Mosley identified as male.
In her unsuccessful attempt to change her sex, she pumped her body full of testosterone. At 18, her healthy breasts were removed, leaving her with a mutilated and scarred chest.
Her hormones were, and are, out of whack. When Mosely, who has detransitioned, went to the doctor because she missed her period, she laughed when he asked if she could be pregnant. Sure, she was in a relationship with her boyfriend, but she assumed she was infertile.
“I still can’t believe I got pregnant,” she told me. “And I still can’t believe he’s healthy.”
But this miracle did not come without a host of complications and medical unknowns. Mosley finds herself in uncharted waters, the first of a small group of women to detransition and become mothers.
Medical interventions such as cross-sex hormones can affect fertility. Mosley began taking testosterone when she was still developing.
“Everything that happens to the female body, especially when they are carrying and giving birth to a baby, has a purpose,” Mosley said, adding that her body’s mechanisms were heavily influenced by testosterone.
After being essentially tried by doctors under the guise of “gender-affirming care,” she’s now sharing raw, intimate details about her unexpected yet fraught path to motherhood.
“I could go on and on about how enormous the pressure is,” Mosely, who is now an ambassador for the Independent Women’s Forum, said of speaking out.
“But what’s worse is that it could happen to other people. The pain of knowing that someone else could feel or experience what I’m experiencing numbs the pain of a public case study. It’s incomparable. No one came to save me when I was little. No one told me the truth.”
Sadly, Mosely now knows the truth. And it hurts.
Her body is devastated. She says her liver is large, her insulin is high. Her uterus, bladder and vagina are atrophied. Her hormone imbalance caused the baby to be large and her hips were too small to deliver vaginally.
“My muscles were used to carry a baby in ways my hips couldn’t handle. I’m in so much pain.”
As she notes, there is no standard of care for detransitioners. Doctors, she said in a short Kelsey Bolar documentary, “Prisha Mosley: A Detransitioner’s Pregnancy Journey,” simply don’t know how to treat her.
“It’s not good news, but it’s honest news,” Mosley said, adding that her previous doctors and therapists who treated her for gender dysphoria “were so sure [in removing her breasts and pumping her with testosterone]. It was a promise. I believed in it completely because I needed it. I didn’t transition because I liked it. There was no neuroscience to change my brain, so I had to edit my body.”
Mosley’s gender confusion began at a young age when she discovered gender ideology online. She suffered from severe anorexia, anxiety and borderline personality disorder and was recovering from a sexual assault at age 15 that resulted in a pregnancy and miscarriage.
Her eating disorder stunted both her emotional development and her physical growth, particularly in her hip area.
At 15, she socially transitioned to male and began testosterone injections at 17. A year later, she underwent a double mastectomy performed by a plastic surgeon in North Carolina.
Motherhood was the last thing on her mind.
After living in the trans community for a few years, she realized in therapy that gender was not her issue. She detransitioned and is now suing eight of her doctors for misleading her into undergoing medical procedures and interventions that made her a patient for life.
Mosley is particularly troubled by the removal of her breasts. She now has painful “rocks” that have formed under her breast, or what her doctor says are milk masses trapped under scar tissue with no outlet because her nipples were reattached and are just “decorative.” My doctor said that some breast tissue was not removed and that I am getting milk in response to prolactin.”
Instead of a soft pillow for her baby, her breast is hard.
“I feel like a monster. I put him on my chest and I don’t feel him.”
Mosley relies on donor breast milk, which she says has been essential to her son’s development. “He spent the first few days of his life searching for things on my breast that weren’t there. All he did was throw up. The only thing that stopped it was the donor breast milk,” she said.
Mosely, who also helps raise her boyfriend’s daughter, would love to have more children. “But it’s also reasonable to think that I wouldn’t be able to survive another pregnancy,” she said.
And yet motherhood, which she describes as physically tortuous but emotionally rewarding, has brought her an unexpected healing.
“I had to become a home for someone else so my body could become a home for me.”