How Did Planned Parenthood Become One of the Country’s Largest Suppliers of Testosterone?
When she was a teenager, Cristina Hineman started testosterone after a 30-minute consult at Planned Parenthood. She’s now suing them. ‘I regretted everything.’
For Cristina Hineman, the situation felt urgent: the 17-year-old needed treatment at Planned Parenthood, where she knew she wouldn’t be subjected to humiliating questions, or an unnecessary waiting period, or lectures, or prying about her certainty. But it wasn’t an abortion she sought. It was testosterone.
Planned Parenthood was founded a century ago to promote birth control. Today, its nearly 600 clinics nationwide make it the largest single provider of abortion, contraception, reproductive care, and sex education in the U.S.
It has also, in less than a decade, become the country’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data. In 2015, around two dozen of their clinics began offering this service. Now it’s available at nearly 450 locations. Insurance claim information provided to The Free Press by the Manhattan Institute shows that at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for this purpose last year alone, a number that has risen tenfold since 2017. The largest proportion, about 40 percent, were 18- to 22-year-olds.
Faced with her parents’ skepticism, Hineman waited to make an appointment for just after her 18th birthday in November 2021 at the Planned Parenthood in Hudson, NY. Some clinics offer hormones starting at age 16 with parental approval, but as a legal adult Hineman wouldn’t need their consent.
After she filled out forms in the Planned Parenthood waiting room, a nurse led her to an exam room and handed her a consent form for “masculinizing hormone therapy.”
Records show that a nurse practitioner asked about Hineman’s identity and desires; she noted that “patient has consulted with a mental health provider”—meaning Hineman had previously talked to therapists. The two discussed the “expected changes” related to testosterone—growing a beard and body hair, deepening voice, and that “changes to fertility may be permanent or reversible.”
Then the first nurse took Hineman’s blood, and she was given a prescription for testosterone gel. She remembers all this taking under 30 minutes.
Like many others in the rising wave of female teens seeking to masculinize, she had been battling a cluster of mental health problems: self-harm, depression, and anxiety. Also like many of these teens, Hineman has autism. The Covid lockdown exacerbated her troubles. She told me, “I couldn’t see my friends, I couldn’t see my girlfriend. I was depressed and scared, in my room ruminating all the time.”
The viral YouTubers she was watching convinced her that gender was the problem. “I was like, oh my god, trans includes all the things I’ve been feeling—my discomfort with my chest, my discomfort with being called ‘young woman,’ not being sure of who I was or what I wanted to be,” she said.
Just over a year into treatment, Hineman realized she had made a terrible mistake, and that gender was not the source of her problems. “I was brainwashed,” she says now. “A lot of people say that adults should be able to do whatever they want. But if you have mental illness that’s clouding your view, or you’re so misinformed about what gender dysphoria even means, then you cannot consent to such invasive treatments.”
Hineman, who went from identifying as “nonbinary” to “agender” to “trans” over the course of a year, now considers herself a “detransitioner”—someone who, if possible, has returned to living as their birth sex, often with medical side effects.
Today, reported exclusively in The Free Press, she is a plaintiff in the first detransitioner lawsuit against Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In the medical malpractice suit, filed in April, she’s seeking unspecified damages for negligence and failure to obtain informed consent from all the health providers—including those at Planned Parenthood—who facilitated her medical transition: from therapists who “encouraged” her desire to change genders, to the plastic surgeon who removed her breasts after a superficial consult when she turned 19, to the nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood who wrote Hineman the prescription for testosterone. (In June, Planned Parenthood filed its answer to the complaint, disputing Hineman’s claims.)
Hineman, who went from “nonbinary” to “agender” to “trans” over the course of a year, now considers herself a “detransitioner”—someone has returned to living as their birth sex, often with medical side effects. Above, Hineman walks with her mother, Naomi, at Poets’ Walk Park in Red Hook, NY. (Cindy Schultz for The Free Press)
She joins more than a dozen young people who, in separate lawsuits across the country, are alleging medical malpractice by institutions such as Kaiser Permanente as well as individual practitioners, and are seeking compensation for the harm they claim has been done to them.
Her suit comes as the U.S. is increasingly alone in championing hormonal and surgical interventions to swiftly transition gender-distressed young people. A growing list of European countries, including Sweden, Finland, and the UK, are restricting these sometimes irreversible treatments for young people and favoring an approach that encourages therapy to address all the causes of a patient’s distress.
In 2020 a young British detransitioner, Keira Bell, was a claimant in a case against the government clinic that supervised her transition. Like Hineman, Bell asserted she was a troubled young person who needed psychological counseling, not medical transition. Her case caused a firestorm that helped lead to the comprehensive Cass Review, released in April, which delivered a scathing indictment of the “gender-affirming” model.
The distinguished English pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, who led the review, has said, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.” Meanwhile, new revelations show that the purported evidence of the benefits of medical transition cited by advocates has been manipulated for political purposes.
But in the U.S., major medical associations from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the Endocrine Society continue to back gender-affirming care. In response, about two dozen Republican-led states have passed laws restricting this treatment for minors.
If malpractice lawsuits like Hineman’s are successful, they have the potential to reshape the currently accepted medical standard of gender care. This can be summarized as setting children on a path to medical transition, and treatment on demand for adults. This applies even when these adults are still teenagers and legally restricted from activities such as buying alcohol or renting a car.
“Treatment without a competent evaluation shouldn’t be foisted on you whether you’re 15 or 30,” says Kevin Keller, an attorney who is consulting pro bono on several detransitioner cases brought by firms across the country. “Vulnerability is the issue. If there’s no comprehensive screening in place before a medical intervention that’s going to have permanent effects,” that’s a breach of duty, he argues.
Hineman describes herself as politically to the left. She supports the right to abortion and does not want to hamper women’s access to that at Planned Parenthood.
Her attorneys may have different political leanings, but Jordan Campbell, who left commercial litigation two years ago to exclusively represent detransitioners, tells me the firm is apolitical. He was motivated to “do something” after hearing a detransitioner’s harrowing experience on a podcast, and law school friends joined the cause. (In 2022, the conservative Independent Women’s Forum launched a series of documentaries about gender medicine, focusing on detransitioners. Four of the dozen people profiled so far are Campbell’s clients, including Hineman. The documentary on her is debuting with this article.)
Keller told me, “There’s a real belief among these plaintiffs and lawyers that this is the great medical scandal of our times.”
Watch the documentary from the IWF about Hineman and her suit against Planned Parenthood here:
There is another civil suit against a Planned Parenthood affiliate, filed in February by a different law firm, representing a detransitioner in the Midwest. She spoke to me on condition that she not be identified by name in this story. I’ll call her Anna.
Two years ago, Anna made an appointment for her 19th birthday at a Planned Parenthood clinic a thousand miles away from Hineman’s. Yet her experience unfolded so identically it’s as if the Planned Parenthood clinician was following a script. And essentially, she was. Planned Parenthood medical guidelines are made by the national headquarters. “Like any franchise, you know what to expect in whatever affiliate you go to because they’re all practicing by the same standards and guidelines,” Dr. Paul Blumenthal, an emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and former chair of Planned Parenthood’s National Medical Committee, told me.
Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the Government-Scam.com/Store.
Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s book “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.
Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” + Liberator flash drive + Larken Rose’s The Most Dangerous Superstition + Art of Liberty Foundation Stickers delivered anywhere in the world. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.