A detransitioning biological female has filed a lawsuit against an Oregon gender clinic after practitioners there allegedly overlooked her mental health issues and fast-tracked a double mastectomy surgery.
The Daily Wire notes that Camille Kiefel, 32, announced the lawsuit last week against healthcare professionals who signed off on the surgery to have her breasts removed after just two brief video meetings. She is being represented by Jackson Bone LLP.
She said that she came to regret the “non-binary” surgery that she had in August 2020 in the ensuing years, describing the procedure the result of an “abhorrent misdiagnosis.”
“I was 30 and at the end of my rope when I transitioned,” Kiefel testified at a recent hearing to discuss the efficacy of medically transitioning to a different gender that was put on by the Florida Boards of Medicine. “At the time I believed I was nonbinary, I struggled with severe mental illness and suicidal ideation.”
The outlet notes further:
Kiefel is suing social worker Amy Ruff and mental health therapist Mara Burmeister, as well as their respective Portland-based gender clinics — Brave Space Oregon and the Quest Center for Integrative Health.
After a 40-minute video call with Burmeister in July 2020, following a one-hour Zoom session with Ruff in May, both “experts” wrote a letter of recommendation for Kiefel to undergo chest reconstruction surgery, the complaint reads.
The 13-page filing also alleged that the named defendants “transgressed the bounds of socially tolerable conduct by abusing their positions of trust and authority” and by facilitating “unnecessary, irreversible treatment.” She claims they did so without taking her mental health issues into consideration.
In an interview with the Daily Wire, she said after a traumatic incident that occurred during her childhood, she was not comfortable with her breasts and hips and started to dress androgynously as “a form of escapism.”
I had a trauma history: when I was in sixth grade, my best friend had been raped by her brother,” Kiefel testified to the Florida Board of Medicine. “Being a girl meant I was more vulnerable, so I started to present as more masculine. This should have been a red flag, yet within months of requesting top surgery, it was performed on me.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the influence of the left on college campuses, Kiefel said that she was introduced to gender identity ideology in 2010 when she was pursuing a minor in women’s studies. Six years later, she began to identify as “nonbinary” after she saw a “gender-affirming” therapist. She said that she spent a great deal of her childhood experiencing depression and anxiety, which lasted into adulthood. Eventually, she developed suicidal thoughts.
By 2020, she began to believe that having her breasts removed it would mitigate her emotional and mental distress. Within a few months after making an initial inquiry, healthcare providers agreed to remove them though she never started taking testosterone or thought she was transgender.
The complaint goes on to allege that Burmeister “failed to conduct an individualized, comprehensive mental health assessment,” and that she should have known that Kiefel was a “high-risk candidate for regretting or not benefitting from undergoing a double mastectomy for the purpose of ‘gender affirmation.’” The complaint also says Burmeister’s referral letter was “based on cut-and-pasted boilerplate diagnostic criteria” that did not consider Keifel’s individual needs.
Ruff, meanwhile, “breached her duty of care” by not following accepted standards of care that are required of Licensed Clinical Social Workers in the State of Oregon, the complaint says. It adds that Ruff failed to provide the plaintiff with “accurate, complete information about the risks of having a double mastectomy ostensibly to relieve or alleviate mental health or emotional distress.”
“People who are struggling mentally and physically can get wrapped up in these ideologies because our current solutions aren’t working for people,” Kiefel told the Daily Wire.
