What’s the Deal With Multiple Personality Detransitioner Layton Ulery?

Don’t look for clarity in the Daily Mail’s troubling but also very confusing story on a woman who claims she developed multiple personalities in a cult and was then forced to transition by her doctors.

by Evan Urquhart

One thing is, perhaps, clear: Layton Ulery is the latest detransitioned woman to sue her former doctors. The rest remains murky, despite a Daily Mail story by Will potter reporting on the claims in Ulery’s lawsuit that ran this past Saturday. Potter’s bizarre story mentions an unnamed cult, multiple personalities, and claims that Ulery’s therapist and doctors pressured her to transition, but fails to provide anything resembling a coherent narrative. This may be due in part to claims that Ulery suffered from dissociative episodes that prevented her from knowing what was happening at the time, exacerbated by the fact that the Daily Mail didn’t interview Ulery but merely reported on the claims presented in her lawsuit.

Here’s an example of the sort of reporting that approach resulted in:

screenshot from the Daily Mail

Relying on the summary of a lawsuit by a biased tabloid is dicey in the best circumstances, and these aren’t those, but in the interests of teasing out what these claims are here’s an attempt at a bulleted list of what Ulery says happened in the lawsuit, in or close to chronological order:

• 2015: Ulery leaves a ““cult she’d been in for 18 years which caused serious trauma-induced mental illness including dissociation and multiple personalities.

• Summer 2017: Ulery, who is living in Rhode Island at this point, seeks mental health treatment from therapist Julie Lyons, who is described as “an expert in transgender and dissociative therapy.”

• Ulery displays multiple personalities, including male alter-egos. Lyons “quickly” comes to believe Ulery is trans, related in some way to Ulery’s male alternate personalities. Lyons also seems to have waived Ulery’s fees and perhaps have done some unconventional things in her sessions, such as hypnosis in a joint session with Ulery’s boyfriend, and accompanying Ulery to “unconventional, new age” church services.

• At some point Ulery is referred by Lyons to Thundermist Health Center where she meets with Dr. Jason Rafferty. She expresses an interest in top surgery and hesitations around starting testosterone.

• At some point Ulery starts testosterone.

• At some point Thundermist provides Ulery with free transportation to her visits.

• At some points Ulery cancels doctors appointments and deletes voice mail messages, doesn’t remember doing so, and attributes this to alternate identities.

• At some point Ulery says she wants to stop testosterone.

• At some point after she says she wants to stop taking testosterone Thundermist stops providing Ulery with free transportation to visits.

• At some point after that, Lyons connects Ulery with Dr. Forcier, who continues her testosterone prescription.

• Ulery takes testosterone for “years.”

• Ulery connects with an unnamed group who heal her multiple personalities and helps her to see that she never had gender dysphoria in the first place.

• Ulery stops testosterone and detransitions.

• 2023: Ulery sues her former therapist and doctors.

screenshot from the Daily Mail

Did the therapist and doctors Ulery saw follow the standards of care, or did they deviate from them in some manner? What part did Ulery’s desires, statements, and provision of consent play in her obtaining a testosterone prescription as an adult, and continuing that prescription with two separate providers? Who is the unnamed group that helped Ulery see that she never had gender dysphoria, and how does their role in convincing her to stop taking the medication differ from what she describes as “pressure” from her therapist and doctors to start taking it? Is it a religious group? A politically active group? Both? The Daily Mail neither asks nor answers any of these questions.

Despite all this uncertainty, all the weird twists and turns and unanswered questions hanging over the story, the Daily Mail’s take away is that there’s something wrong not just with how this woman was treated but with gender-affirming care as a specialty. Despite all this uncertainty, Martina Navratilova felt confident enough to weigh in, saying she expects this is “just the beginning” of, presumably, former cult members with dissociative identity disorder coming forward to say their doctors pressured them into transitioning. Navratilova’s comments were then turned into another skewed story. On and on it goes, and where it stops? Probably full bans on adult medical transition in the states that banned it for minors, if we’re being honest.

It is far from impossible that a person struggling with serious mental illness could run into a bad therapist or a bad gender clinic, and that may have happened to Ulery (although the details in the Daily Mail article aren’t nearly enough to conclude anything like that). However, it’s also possible for mentally ill people to fully participate in their treatment with competent, caring providers and to seek and consent to the kinds of treatments they believe is the most likely to help them. And, with treatments for physical ailments as well as mental illness, everything doesn’t work equally well for all patients, and patients may try a variety of approaches before finding out what works for them.

The political detransition movement consists of a handful of people who, after having either a bad but atypical experience or deciding to reframe past events in a way that blames healthcare providers for their own decisions, have chosen to launch a political assault on the overwhelming majority of people for whom gender-affirming care is a lifesaver. Despite years of predictions of a coming wave of detransition regret, it has still never materialized. Detransition is rare, and politically radicalized anti-trans detransitioners are even rarer. In many states which passed bans on gender-affirming care for youth, not a single local example of a detransitioner who supported the legislation could be found to testify, leading the anti-trans side to fly fewer than ten such people across the country to testify.

What actually happened to Layton Ulery? The Daily Mail doesn’t know, and neither do any of us. A sensible approach to improving gender-affirming care would start by identifying cases where something went wrong and asking what happened and how to improve treatment for everyone, whether by identifying individuals who aren’t following best practices or by adapting the best practices in an iterative process. That’s not what politically motivated junk lawsuits like Ulery’s are proposing.

UPDATE: After publication, Ulery responded to the story publicly on Twitter and eventually answered some of the questions left unclear in the Daily Mail story. Here is the post:

screenshot from twitter.com

Assigned appreciates the clarification from Ms. Ulery!