Two years after her daughter was given a double mastectomy at the age of 24 by the NHS to remove her healthy breasts – in order to ‘change gender’ – Jane is still absolutely ‘livid’.
‘I foolishly believed that the NHS was there to protect my daughter – to do no harm,’ the mother of two tells the Mail.
‘For her to get a mastectomy paid for by the NHS, removing healthy tissue that is there to help feed your offspring, when my sister and my stepsister have had breast cancer and mastectomies, makes me beyond angry.
‘I imagine that after the surgery her breasts were probably just discarded in a bucket somewhere and put in an incinerator like some unwanted rag or trash. It’s just abhorrent that the NHS is doing this to young girls.’
It was revealed earlier this month, in figures obtained under Freedom of Information laws, that more than 1,000 women a year are being sent for taxpayer-funded ‘masculinising’ mastectomies at specialised gender clinics.
This week, it was further disclosed by Health and Social Care Minister Karin Smyth, in answer to a parliamentary question, that the NHS’s Gender Dysphoria National Referral Support Services had received 5,463 requests for transgender chest surgery between April 2020 and December 2024. Gender dysphoria is the feeling that a person’s biological sex is mismatched with their gender identity.
There is no data about how many of those who were referred for mastectomies went through with the surgery. But, notably, there has been a year-on-year rise in the numbers, from 1,089 in 2021 to 1,164 in 2022, and 1,237 in 2023. As many as 80 per cent of those are females between the ages of 17 and 25.
These figures are thought to be just the tip of the iceberg, with many patients having transgender surgery privately to avoid the lengthy NHS waiting lists, which can be up to two years.
More than 1,000 women a year are being sent for taxpayer-funded ‘masculinising’ mastectomies at specialised gender clinics
Now, the parents of these young women tell the Mail they’ve been left devastated by their decision to remove their breasts and furious with the doctors who do it. Some say their children have been referred for private surgery after just two hours of psychological assessment via video calls, while others tell how their children were given mastectomies on the NHS within just eight months of being referred.
The Mail has also heard how increasing numbers of young women are deeply regretting undergoing masculinising mastectomies and discovering how difficult it is to reconstruct breasts after the surgery, and that they will still never be able to breastfeed.
In total, there are ten hospitals across the country that carry out NHS-funded masculinising mastectomies. Figures show that North Manchester Hospital has the highest number of referrals, followed by Parkside Hospital in south-west London and Castle Hill Hospital in Hull.
By all accounts, proving eligibility for such surgery is a relatively simple procedure.
According to NHS guidelines, patients must have a referral letter from a ‘lead professional’ at a gender dysphoria clinic, and must also show they have ‘persistent, well-documented’ gender dysphoria.
They must be aged 17 or over and have the capacity to make an informed decision. It is not necessary to take hormones such as testosterone for any period of time to qualify for the surgery.
Jane says her daughter’s NHS journey began not long after she informed her parents, at the age of 15, that she thought she should be a boy. A year later, she had secured her first appointment at an adult gender clinic.
‘I thought, “OK, she’s going to this clinic and all this is going to be sorted out because she’s clearly not a boy,”’ says Jane.
Medical experts say that, while the exact figures are still unknown, the most common form of procedure sought by young women being referred to adult gender clinics is now breast removal
However, to her mother’s astonishment, after the fifth session at the clinic, the teenager, who we are not naming – then 18 – was given a prescription for testosterone to begin the physical process of transitioning to live as a male.
‘I was not prepared for that at all because I really thought that the NHS was there to be the devil’s advocate and to protect her,’ Jane remembers. Instead, the clinicians Jane’s child saw ‘affirmed’ her belief that she was, in fact, a boy from the word go. ‘I had no idea that they were using an “affirming” model.’
The next step came at the age of 23 when, shortly after moving out of the family home in Buckinghamshire, Jane’s daughter returned to break the news that she was booked to have a mastectomy at an NHS hospital in Plymouth. ‘I honestly couldn’t believe it,’ says Jane.
In fact, her daughter had been using a chest binder – a tight undergarment, usually made of spandex, that compresses and flattens the breasts – for years.
That meant ‘she was having problems with breathing, pain around her ribs and her chest and her breasts had been quite damaged’.
‘So she told me she was going for a full-on mastectomy,’ says Jane.
She has since discovered that her daughter received a referral for the surgery from the gender clinic she had been attending. And, despite reports of NHS patients languishing on waiting lists for years, it was just eight months between her first referral in October 2022 to the operation in May 2023.
She was even allowed to choose her own surgeon, which her mother says she did after seeking counsel from a Facebook group where girls who had undergone mastectomies to change gender shared details and pictures of their surgeries.
‘To this day I’m shocked how quickly she got the surgery from her referral,’ says Jane.
She believes that, rather than having gender dysphoria, her daughter instead has a form of body dysmorphia.
Still in a state of distress at the irreversible treatment her child has undergone, Jane says there is little understanding among the public of how serious and widespread the issue of girls having healthy breasts removed has become.
A case in point, she says, is a response she received from TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp when Jane told her on X that her daughter was having her healthy breasts removed.
Allsopp replied, saying both her sisters have had breasts removed because of a family history of cancer and there’s ‘a great deal of dark humour in it and you’d do well to recognise that’.
Staggered at the response, Jane says the radical change to the bodies of the many young women who have taken the same route as her daughter is no laughing matter. Indeed, she knows more than a few of them.
‘My son’s close friend did it. There are others I have met, too – the ages vary, but they are usually around 19, 20 and early 20s.’
For Louise, from Oxfordshire, the call from her daughter to tell her she’d had a double mastectomy came ‘completely out of the blue’.
As any mother would be, she was ‘floored’ by the news that her child, who is autistic, had gone to a private hospital in Sweden for the surgery.
Unbeknown to her mother, the 22-year-old had funded the operation by saving money from a work placement during her third year of university.
‘I was in total shock when she first told me,’ says Louise. ‘I couldn’t stop screaming. It felt like part of me had been cut off at that point. It’s like being kicked so hard you can’t make sense of it.’
While her daughter had explored ‘trans identities’ with ‘eco-warrior’ friends at school, she had never attempted any physical changes before, says Louise, still at a loss to explain it.
‘She was actually quite a curvy girl and I think that was part of the problem because she developed early.
‘She had a classic hourglass figure and blonde hair, so she got lots of attention. But in a way that made her feel uncomfortable and freaked her out.’
Could a deep dislike of the sexual attention young women receive from men be the real reason so many take such radical decisions? Growing up in a hyper-sexualised online culture is very tough on girls, say many of their mothers.
It was at the University of Brighton that Louise’s daughter first started identifying as male. Louise says she is particularly angry with the medics who removed her daughter’s breasts because she believes they failed to carry out proper psychological assessments before the surgery.
‘She won’t tell me the name of the clinic because she knows I’ll try to take legal action because I don’t think they did any due diligence,’ she says. ‘My daughter is very clever and gifted in many ways but, because of her autism, emotionally she’s like a child and incredibly trusting.
‘You wouldn’t have to talk to her for long actually to realise she’s not in a position to make a decision like that.’
After the surgery, Louise says her daughter insisted that she is happy with the results and is adamant that she will never have children and breastfeed.
But her mother has grave doubts about whether her rejection of motherhood will be quite so final.
‘We know that lots of women change their minds about this when they get older.’
Another mother whose daughter had a double mastectomy at the age of 21 through a private gender clinic in London tells me that the ordeal has caused them to become estranged.
Rita says her child, whom she is also convinced is autistic, funded the treatment herself by saving her wages from a part-time job she had at university.
The young student had been on testosterone for less than six months – which, Rita says, made her face sallow and her hair thin – when she was referred for the surgery in 2021.
At this point, Rita says she went into ‘panic mode’ and wrote directly to the surgeon, threatening to report him to his professional body if the operation went ahead. Her daughter, she maintains, had been given the green light after just two one-hour Zoom sessions with a psychiatrist.
She told the surgeon her daughter was autistic but wouldn’t ‘face up’ to it, adding that she was convinced, in a now strikingly familiar pattern, that she was suffering from body dysmorphia.
Much to Rita’s relief, the surgery was stopped the day before it was due to go ahead, but she soon discovered this delay was only temporary and, after getting a second psychological opinion, the clinic pushed forward with the mastectomy.
Less than a year later, her daughter appeared before her with bandages still in place across her chest after having the breast removal.
‘When your child walks through the door and they’ve done something so final to themselves, you’re not prepared for it,’ a tearful Rita says.
‘I didn’t scream and shout. I just said to her, “So you’ve done it now. So there’s no reason for you to be angry any more.” And gave her a hug.’
But, sadly, the ordeal did not end there because, under the influence of a cocktail of hormones and painkillers after the operation, Rita says her ‘gentle’ daughter became ‘unbearable’ and a few weeks later cut ties with her family completely.
So how does Rita feel now about the medical professionals who facilitated her daughter’s mastectomy?
‘They’re cowboys,’ she says, simply. ‘Ten years ago they weren’t doing this – they were doing breast enhancements, lips and nose jobs.
‘They are taking advantage of those who are in a desperate situation and that’s not right.’
Reflecting the growing popularity of this form of surgery, numerous videos can be found on YouTube and TikTok of young women who have transitioned to ‘present’ as male explaining the process of having the mastectomy either privately or on the NHS.
GP and activist Dr Louise Irvine from CAN-SG, a group of clinicians calling for greater understanding of the effects of sex and gender in healthcare, warns that, despite the rise, there is little or no follow-up data being gathered after this type of surgery.
‘This is particularly important as the only indication given for this surgery is to treat “gender dysphoria”,’ she says. That means a permanent surgical intervention is being used to alleviate psychological distress.
‘We do not know if the surgery achieves this aim, or whether it could have been achieved in a less invasive and permanent way.’
Equally concerning is the lack of information about how many young women regret having their breasts removed.
Psychotherapist Stella O’Malley founded a detransition service called Beyond Trans – for people who want to ‘return’ to their birth sex – in 2022, and now says she’s seeing a growing number of women who deeply regret having mastectomies at both NHS and private hospitals.
Ms O’Malley says she knows of at least three ‘detransitioners’ who have had their breasts removed on the NHS who are aged just 19.
‘There’s something about the unequivocal irreversibility of it that makes them feel like they’ve attacked their own body,’ she tells me.
‘Breastfeeding comes up a huge amount. They think of their future self and it also represents motherhood to them. They think in some way they’ve neglected their future babies.’
The saddest part, she explains, is that, rather than seeing their breast removal as something that allowed them to be their ‘true selves’, they come to see it as an ‘act of self-harm’.
‘It’s very hard to be 20 years old and regret events that are now not reversible,’ she says.
This week, Dr Irvine called on NHS England to review its decision to fund masculinising mastectomies. Medical experts say that, while the exact figures are still unknown, the most common form of procedure sought by young women being referred to adult gender clinics is now breast removal, often referred to as ‘top surgery’.
‘It should ask whether permanent body changes are the right answer for this new and poorly understood group of complex and troubled young women,’ she adds.
An NHS spokesperson said: ‘Masculinising chest surgery is only available to adult patients who have a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a specialist NHS clinic.
‘The NHS is currently undertaking a wide-ranging review of adult gender services and the resulting service specification will be subject to a process of public consultation later this year.’
Names have been changed to protect identities.
