The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is named in a new lawsuit alleging medical malpractice, following the decision of multiple physicians to medically transition a then-14-year-old girl suffering from suicidal ideation.
Isabelle Ayala, who is now 21 years old, accused her doctors and the AAP of civil conspiracy, fraud, and medical malpractice in a lawsuit filed Monday, obtained by the Daily Wire.
At just 14, Ayala was hospitalized after having suicidal thoughts, where she was seen by Dr. Jason Rafferty who, according to the lawsuit, said that she “meets [the] criteria to consider hormonal transition.”
“Defendants Dr. Rafferty, Dr. Forcier, Dr. Morris, Wagner, and Lifespan Physician Group misled Isabelle into believing that taking testosterone would resolve her mental health issues, particularly her depression and anxiety, and restore her overall health and well-being.”
Complaint: AYALA v. AAP
Just six months after she was first prescribed cross-sex hormones, Ayala attempted to commit suicide.
Ayal is “an unfortunate victim of a collection of actors who prioritized politics and ideology over children’s safety, health, and well-being,” the lawsuit explains, doubling down on the notion that so-called “gender-affirming” care is a “new and experimental” form of treatment.
The plaintiff’s lawyers say that medical professionals knowingly lied about the efficacy of such treatments because of the profit incentive they received. Additionally, the AAP is accused of intentionally misleading the public into believing that the “affirming” care model has traditionally been the standard practice for treating gender dysphoria in minors.
“These individuals [at the AAP] saw an opportunity to pioneer new guidance on an emerging field in pediatric medicine—the treatment of the rapidly increasing number of children and adolescents presenting as transgender and gender diverse—that would enshrine as authoritative their ideological beliefs. But finding no evidentiary support for their radical positions, they nonetheless prepared and authored a ‘policy statement’ reviewed, approved, and published by Defendant AAP, proposing an entirely new model of treatment, which not only misrepresented or misleadingly presented its purported evidentiary support but was also rife with outright fraudulent representations.”
Complaint: AYALA v. AAP
AAP’s policy, still visible on their website and titled “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents,” reads “like a trans activism manifesto, not a medical guide,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh posted on X. Among the several radical ideas posed within the policy statement is the notion that “if a mental health issue exists [in adolescents] it most often stems from stigma and negative experiences rather than being intrinsic to the child,” which directly correlates with how doctors treated Ayala’s mental health conditions.
Physicians who treated Ayala “immediate[ly]” with “no-questions-asked,” affirmed her, and other young patients’ “desired gender” and “quickly plac[ed] them on a conveyor belt of life-altering puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or experimental surgeries.”
Another doctor listed as a defendant in the lawsuit, Michelle Forcier, also appeared in Matt Walsh’s documentary “What Is A Woman?” where she denied any existence of biological reality among humans. According to the Daily Wire, both physicians who treated Ayala — Rafferty and Fortier — were mentioned in a separate lawsuit filed by the same law firm, Campbell Miller Payne PLLC, on Friday. “That suit is on behalf of a woman with multiple personality disorder who says she was pressured by the doctors into undergoing aggressive testosterone treatments and is now dealing with the painful and permanent side effects,” the outlet reported.
Ayala’s lawyers also insist that the remnants of the testosterone treatments are “a constant reminder that she needed an unbiased medical expert willing to evaluate her mental health and provide her the care she needed, rather than a group of ideologues set on promoting their own agenda and furthering a broader conspiracy at her expense.”
Ayala reportedly still suffers severe and lasting consequences of the treatments prescribed to her, including vaginal atrophy, excess facial and body hair, “compromised bone structure,” and “she is unsure whether her fertility has been irreversibly compromised.” The lawsuit also adds that Ayala experiences episodes of anxiety and depression, “further compounded by a sense of regret,” and “she has since contracted an autoimmune disease that only the males in her family have a history of.”
Isabelle Ayala has joined an exhaustive list of former “gender-affirmed” patients who have filed lawsuits against doctors that provided them with radical gender-bending experimental treatments as minors, before the legal age of consent, which have left them permanently injured or mutilated.
