As a result of cross-sex hormones and the removal of her healthy body parts, 26-year-old detransitioner Prisha Mosley assumed she was infertile.
That’s why, when a doctor treating her for post-transition hormonal issues asked if she could be pregnant, Mosley laughed.

“I was sad and thought it was impossible,” Mosley said. “I told him that I was sure I couldn’t.”

But Mosley had missed her last period and thought that perhaps she was being paranoid about her ability to get pregnant. So on her way home, she bought three pregnancy tests. 

When the tests came back positive, Mosley sent a photo to her boyfriend asking if her eyes were working.

Eight months later, “It still feels that unreal,” Mosley said.

On June 3, Mosley gave birth to a healthy baby boy via c-section. She is among the first wave of female detransitioners to embark on a motherhood journey filled with healing and new beginnings, but laced with more medical experiments and unknowns.

Unexpectedly Pregnant

“I was never concerned about my fertility when I was trans-identifying nor when I was being medicalized,” Mosley said. “I actually think it would’ve been worrisome if I did want to have children when I was 17.” 

Mosley’s journey with gender ideology began around age 15, shortly after she became the victim of a sexual assault that resulted in a miscarriage. 

“This all made motherhood and womanhood unpalatable to me,” she said. “It was the last thing I was thinking of.”

Mosley embraced a male identity to escape her womanhood, as she simultaneously battled mental health problems including anorexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, and depression.

Under the guidance of a team of doctors and counselors who led her to believe that changing her body through drugs and surgery would cure these mental struggles, Mosley started taking testosterone at age 17.

“Testosterone changed my sexuality,” Mosley said of the schedule III controlled substance that she now knows carries safety risks affecting the heart, brain, liver, and endocrine system. Prior to being prescribed testosterone, Mosley said she wasn’t physically attracted to men. “When I began to have that desire for the first time—and of course maybe it was just becoming an adult—I thought that I could only safely engage with men as a man. I thought that sex happens to women, but men have sex because they want to.”

“I didn’t care about myself,” Mosley added. “So I wasn’t doing anything to stay safe and I didn’t get pregnant.”

After detransitioning, Mosley didn’t give much thought to birth control. She was suffering from a range of complications impacting her sexual and reproductive health, including clitoral growth, vaginal atrophy, incontinence, and hormonal imbalances, all of which led her to believe she was infertile.  

But “very suddenly,” Mosley said, “I was pregnant.”

Though fearful, Mosley was grateful for the gift of pregnancy. Already, she had taken on the role of a mother to her boyfriend’s toddler daughter, and she now had the blessing of carrying her own child. But little did she know, Mosley’s pregnancy journey would be riddled with challenging complications, and at times, doctors found themselves at a loss for what to do.

A Medical Experiment

Just a few weeks into her pregnancy, Mosley found herself over the toilet battling severe nausea and vomiting. Unlike many women whose so-called “morning sickness” subsides after the first trimester, Mosley reported being sick through the entire nine months.

“My doctor believes that I have such severe nausea all the time because women normally get morning sickness because of the sudden influx of hormones—the human growth, the progesterone or estrogen, all of that—and he thinks it’s so severe for me because I was already low on everything I needed before that,” she said. “So it’s just a bigger jump, a bigger change and shift. And I have to continue to be on progesterone hormones anyway to be able to sustain the pregnancy, so that makes it even higher, even more.”

Mosley developed an eating disorder around age 12, and her body never finished puberty before starting testosterone. Because of all this, Mosley said her hip bones aren’t wide enough to accommodate her child’s head. Doctors also told Mosley that her post-transition hormonal imbalance was causing her baby to be big, on top of her vaginal and pelvic atrophy causing her own uterus to be small. This made carrying her baby extremely painful, and vaginal delivery impossible. 

“He won’t fit through my bones,” Mosley said. “It’s not a choice I can make.” 

Mosley described her endocrine system, which is responsible for creating and releasing hormones to maintain many bodily functions including growth and development, metabolism, and reproduction, as being “destroyed” due to years of testosterone. Before becoming pregnant, Mosley had already struggled to find adequate medical care to address her post-transition hormonal imbalance. Pregnancy, she said, worsened her endocrine problems.

“I didn’t know this as a minor, but insulin is a hormone,” she said. “And so destroying your endocrine system can change everything. I can’t control my weight, my liver is twice the size it’s supposed to be. And doctors just don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to prescribe. They say, ‘I don’t know.’”

After years of healthcare providers misleading her into believing that she had been born in the wrong body and that she needed medical interventions to bring her brain and body into alignment, Mosley found comfort in hearing doctors acknowledge that they “don’t know.”

“It’s difficult to be an experiment again,” she said, “but at least there’s honest communication about it.”

Womanhood, Rediscovered

At 18, less than a year and a half after starting testosterone, a plastic surgeon in North Carolina cut off Mosley’s healthy breasts for a cost of $7,100. In addition to removing healthy breast tissue, the surgeon removed her nipples, reshaped them, and then surgically reattached them to her chest in the wrong spot. Now a mother, Mosley will never have the option to breastfeed her baby.

“I know a lot of women do not breastfeed and that’s fine,” Mosley said. “I’m just sad that I don’t get to choose that.”

Beyond the inability to nurse or to produce her own breast milk, Mosley reported suffering from phantom breast syndrome, which she describes as “a waking nightmare in which I am haunted by the ghosts of my missing body parts.” She also mourned the sensations she’ll never get to experience while holding her newborn son.

“My chest is hard and flat and not soft for him, and it’s numb for me,” she said. “I know he’ll feel me, but my chest isn’t soft and pillowy the way it’s supposed to be—and I have hair on it and I have scars on it, and when he’s there, I won’t feel anything.” 

“I try not to,” she added, “but I think a lot about the fact that if I held my baby or if I set my chest on fire, it would feel like the same exact thing. Nothing.”

While being robbed of her female body parts has caused lasting trauma in Mosley’s life, it’s also what led her to discover the beauty of motherhood, sisterhood, and womanhood.

“I’ve received so many messages and even gifts from my baby registry, and there are a few women who are even donating breast milk to me,” she said. “What can I say in response to such a gift? Truly the gift of life.”

“None of this was necessary or meant to happen, and women have come and shared with me and showed me what womanhood is, what love is,” she added. “And there’s nothing scary or bad about it. It’s like the most beautiful thing in the world when you’re at capacity to understand what was taken away and what is being given.”

Pursuing Justice

In May, near the final month of her pregnancy, Mosley received news that the lawsuit she filed against her healthcare providers was scheduled for a preliminary hearing. Mosley’s is one of an estimated 18 detransitioner lawsuits being filed against gender clinics and medical professionals for medical malpractice and other charges. 

Seven and a half months pregnant, Mosley’s boyfriend drove her from Michigan to North Carolina to attend the hearing, as Mosley threw up “in every state.” While she wasn’t required to be there in person, Mosley and her attorneys at Campbell Miller Payne, a firm that represents detransitioners nationwide, felt it was important to be present as the defendants—her plastic surgeon, former counselors, and physician—attempted to dismiss her case. 

“They weren’t nice,” she said. “They made me cry. But it wasn’t anything terribly unexpected.” 

The defendants denied any wrongdoing in their motion to dismiss the case. But on May 7, Judge Robert Ervin of the North Carolina Superior Court denied the motions to dismiss with respect to Mosely’s claims for fraud, facilitating fraud, and civil conspiracy, making it the first detransitioner lawsuit of its kind to be ruled legally viable and allowed to move forward in a court of law. The case will now proceed to the discovery phase. 

The prospect of winning potentially millions of dollars in her lawsuit is hard for Mosley to imagine. “Justice hasn’t been a significant theme in my life,” she said. “I don’t know what it looks like or tastes like to even want it.” 

She attributed that to “the gaslighting” she’s dealt with and her own “bad self-image.” But as she’s now listened to the stories of fellow detransitioners—many of whom have become close friends—Mosley finds herself able to be hurt and angry about what happened to her and so many others.

“As I listened to the stories of my friends, I came to find out, harm is the standard of care,” Mosley said. “What happened was what was supposed to happen. I just became too healthy eventually to continue to buy the lie.”

Mosley’s health issues limit her ability to work and live a normal life. But since first telling her story through Independent Women’s Forum’s Identity Crisis documentary series, she has become a voice for detransitioners, whose experiences are frequently downplayed and belittled by popular media. 

“Transition and everything completely changed the course of my life. None of this was my plan,” Mosley said. “I’m really happy that I’ve been able to turn something so destructive and awful into something good for other people.”

By publicly sharing the pain and suffering she’s endured, Mosley hopes to seek justice for all detransitioners, and to protect children who are still at risk of being captured by the ideology that robbed her of her childhood and future health.

Now tasked with a new title, mother, Mosley hopes to also raise her son to understand the difference between feeling good and being good––a discernment she struggled to make for herself until it was too late.

“I’m hoping to have strength and wisdom and discernment so I can decide what to tell him and when. It’s been a big lesson, even just through being an adult, that the right thing doesn’t always feel good, and things that feel good aren’t always the right thing,” she said. “I desperately hope that I’m able to impart that knowledge onto my son. I would like him to always feel good and always be happy, but we don’t live in a world that always feels good and is always happy.”

“So I suppose I’m walking the tightrope between protecting innocence and not creating a child who is disabled and unable to handle the world,” she added. “Because it is bad in some places, and there are people who lie.”