In 1959, Henry Mosley was a medical resident at Johns Hopkins University. Just six years earlier, the notorious sex researcher Alfred Kinsey published a two-part scholarly paper that defined “gender identity” as a spectrum for the first time. Fifty years later, Mosley came face-to-face with Kinsey’s poisonous ideology when his 16-year-old granddaughter Prisha assumed a transgender identity.

“I literally didn’t know about it,” Mosley said of Kinsey’s gender ideology movement. “When Prisha was told that she was transgender, that was the first time I became aware of all the issues that were involved.”

Mosley, a physician epidemiologist with a focus in international public health, spent much of his celebrated career in family planning, which was controversial at the time. His intention, he said, was to prevent abortions by helping families to only have as many children as they could support. 

“After I received my Master’s in Public Health from Johns Hopkins, I worked in Bangladesh and Pakistan for six years,” he said. “There was quite a bit of controversy about contraception in those very conservative cultures.” 

Being no stranger to controversy, Mosley was not ready to immediately fall in line with his granddaughter’s “transgender” diagnosis, especially given what he knew about her mental health issues.

“I called her counselor, who just completely put me off. She said I didn’t know what I was talking about,” Mosley said. “My son, Jonathan Mosley, who’s a physician, also spoke with her, but there was nothing we could do to persuade her that Prisha was mentally ill.”

Prisha’s counselor insisted that Prisha’s distress was the result of an unaffirmed “trans” identity, despite Mosley’s observation that “[Prisha] was attempting suicide, cutting herself, and having all kinds of serious mental health problems.”

This gross mishandling of the situation, which defied American Medical Association (AMA) guidelines recommending mental health screening and psychotherapy for gender-confused patients, led to Prisha’s continued mental health decline. At the time, Mosley said, there was nothing more he could do.

“[Gender ideology] is like a cult or a religion, and  you can’t persuade people who have certain religious beliefs that they are contrary to science,” he said. 

Mosley said he managed to keep in contact with Prisha during the next few years, during which time she identified as a boy named “Charlie.” 

“She broke off completely with the family, which typically happens in these cases, and retreated to a transgender community in Florida,” he said. “We just kept in communication with her, and told her that we loved her and would support her in any way we could.” 

He continued, “If she’d been schizophrenic or had another severe illness, it wouldn’t change our feelings about her, and we didn’t change our feelings about her when she was so mentally unhealthy.” 

Despite his misgivings about her transgender diagnosis, Mosley’s love and support became a lifeline to Prisha during a particularly dark time for her. 

“When she broke up with her partner and decided to leave Florida, we helped her,” Mosley said. “She had found a job in Michigan, and we rented her a truck and helped her make the move.”

It was during her time in Michigan that Prisha ultimately decided to detransition, which Mosley said was a huge relief. Despite his unconditional support for Prisha, it was clear that her transgender diagnosis had only made her problems worse. 

“Her mental illness was not relieved at all by transition,” he said. “She was told that ‘You’re really a male, and if you just transition, life is going to be good.’ Well, of course, none of her mental health symptoms were alleviated by living as a male.” 

Mosley said he’s watched Prisha’s journey from a confused and misled teen to a powerful advocate with joy and pride. 

“I’m grateful that people in my family are listening to me and care about the damage that happened,” Prisha told IW Features. “People trust doctors, but recently, doctors working with patients who claim to be trans have been dishonest and harmful.”

Eventually, Mosley himself became an advocate for vulnerable children who, like Prisha, are being fast-tracked into a life of pain and regret. He recently testified at the Maryland State House, urging lawmakers to ban so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors due to the complete lack of information about the long-term effects of such “care.”

Mosley also recently published an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun arguing that gender ideology should be kept out of schools. 

Despite his impeccable credentials and personal experience with the subject, however, Mosley said he has been unable to have any impact at all at Johns Hopkins, where gender ideology is deeply entrenched.

“I found out that my medical records at the university had been changed from saying ‘sex’ to ‘sex assigned at birth,’” he said. “I emailed the CEO of the medical school with a little information about biology, and he never responded.”

Mosley said he also reached out to Johns Hopkins’ “Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health,” which followed the widely discredited World Professional Assocation for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines for “gender-affirming care,” warning them that they were at risk of being sued by exposing young, impressionable patients to irreversible interventions and their consequences. Again, he said, no one responded for over a year. Recently, however, the WPATH recommendations were quietly removed from the website.

Mosley said he will continue to be outspoken against what he calls “medical malpractice” in the gender medicine field. 

“When we know that a high percentage of transgender persons have underlying mental health disorders or have suffered sexual assault, it’s incredible how this ideology has captured the medical profession,” he said.

However, Mosley believes that the rising wave of detransitioner lawsuits, like the one filed by Prisha against the medical professionals who pushed her to transition, will be the nail in the coffin for “gender-affirming care.”

“The underlying issue here is money,” he said of medical gender interventions. “These lawsuits are going to have a huge impact.”