By Alex Brick –
A woman who detransitioned reached a settlement in May after suing the mental health providers who approved her for a double mastectomy after only two consultations over Zoom that lasted an hour or less each.
“It’s difficult because now I’m the most mentally healthy and most mentally stable I’ve been in my entire life, but I now no longer have my breasts,” says Camille Kiefel, 36. “And it is difficult because there’s little reminders like, I’ll be looking in a mirror after taking a shower and those ugly scars are still there. Dresses don’t fit me the same way.
“I’d like to have kids, but I would never be able to nurse them, and I’ll never have that connection with them,” Kiefel adds. “They won’t get the benefits of breast milk. So it’s been difficult.”
Kiefel first heard the term nonbinary in a women’s studies class in college and thought it might help her with her own insecurities. After her best friend got raped, she suffered from insecurities.
“”I started dressing more masculine after that,” she says. “I just wanted to protect myself.”
To have her breasts removed, all she needed was two referral letters, which she obtained by talking to Amy Ruff, a licensed clinical social worker, and to Mara Burmeister, a licensed professional counselor. It took less than two hours.
The suit, filed in 2022, named their employers Brave Space and the Quest Center for Integrative Health. The telemedicine consultations were very brief and failed to take into account her previous mental health history, including trauma, depression, suicidal ideation and ADHD.
“I wasn’t given true informed consent,” Kiefel says. ”That’s something that everyone deserves to have for any medical procedure.”
Kiefel submitted to the double mastectomy surgery in August 2020. It didn’t solve her “gender distress,” she says. She detransitioned two years later.
Her suit initially sought $3.5 million, but she settled for an undisclosed sum just days before it was supposed to go to trial. Her suit is part of an avalanche of suits following hard on the heels of the rush to reassign during the heyday of woke politics under President Biden.
“I don’t want what happened to me to happen to other vulnerable girls and women,” Kiefel says.
