“Sometimes in the shower, I realize they’re gone. I just have these scars.”
Camille Kiefel, 32, had her healthy breasts removed in 2020 to align with her nonbinary gender identity. She says her doctors approved the surgery after two Zoom meetings, breezing past a whole host of mental health issues.
Now that Camille is in a better place mentally, she realizes her surgery was a mistake. So, two and a half years later, she’s suing her social worker, therapist, and the gender clinics they work for — Brave Space Oregon and Quest Center for Integrative Health — seeking up to $850,000 in damages.
As a child, Camille never gave her gender identity a thought. But when her best friend was raped by a relative in sixth grade, she said she became acutely aware of her femininity. Around that time her father also imparted well-meaning advice that backfired.
“My dad told me about how men talked about girls, because he wanted to protect me and to get me to dress more conservatively,” she told The Post. “But it made my anxiety worse. All that really screwed me up. I remember I was even afraid to be alone.”
From that point on, she began dressing more androgynously. “I didn’t want to highlight my curves. I had a lot of discomfort around my breasts and hips.”
But the idea that she might not actually be a woman didn’t occur to Camille until she enrolled at Portland State University, where she minored in gender studies and was introduced to alternative views about sex and gender.
By the time she reached her mid-20s, she embraced a nonbinary label and used she/they pronouns. All the while, she was struggling with a slew of mental-health issues, including anxiety disorder, social anxiety, PTSD, major depressive disorder and ADHD.
In the depths of the pandemic in 2020, Camille, then 30, was still struggling and thought gender-neutral top surgery could ease her mental-health issues. “I was so dysfunctional, and I just wanted something that was going to help me,” she recalled. “I thought I would be happier.”
She got a referral to a major gender clinic in Oregon, where she talked to doctors via Zoom twice — once in May and once in July, each time for about an hour. And that was all it took. She said she never saw anyone in person before she had her breasts removed on Aug. 28. (Brave Space Oregon and Quest Center for Integrative Health did not respond to requests for comment.)
Complications were almost immediate. She said she experienced trouble swallowing and scopolamine poisoning from a patch on the back of her ear meant to treat nausea, which caused her pupils to dilate for months post-surgery.
All of a sudden, she said the doctors who approved of her surgery and validated her feelings left her in the lurch. “Doctors took me seriously up until surgery, but after I developed all these complications, I noticed they stopped taking me seriously,” Camille said. “I was on my own at that point.”
And, while she hoped the procedure would help her mental health, she wasn’t quite so sure when she saw the final result: “I remember when the doctor took the bandages off, I felt kind of mixed.”
In the ensuing months, Camille got her mental and physical health in order, and once again identifies as a female. She said she now sees the situation from a more stable viewpoint.
“There’s nothing to transition to as nonbinary,” Camille said. “There’s no third sex out there. It’s just based on a feeling that this would be a good fit for you. It’s a designer surgery but I didn’t think of it at the time . . . It’s a weird Frankenstein surgery that they’re doing.”
In retrospect, she noticed just how much her doctors had overlooked when they approved her procedure. She told them about the trauma she experienced when her friend was raped and her emotional struggles. Yet she was still given a green light to remove her breasts.
“The doctors are under this gender ideology as well, so there’s this sort of idea that you can have mental illness and be trans,” she explained. “It’s almost like a confirmation bias and they didn’t really look into it.”
Her dating life has also been impacted. Recently, a partner broke up with her when they found out she doesn’t have breasts. And, although Camille would like to have children one day, she will never be able to breastfeed.
“I still get sad about that,” she said. “It’s depressing what happened. I had this radical surgery, and now I’ll always deal with the consequences.”
Camille is being represented by Jackson Bone LLP in her legal battle in Oregon State Court and is being supported by the feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front.
She hopes that taking the case to court will prevent history from repeating itself.
Many people “who should not be getting these surgeries are getting these surgeries,” she said. “There are underlying health issues that are being overlooked. People like myself are slipping through the cracks.”
