Finnish parents have lost custody of their “mentally challenged” 15-year-old daughter after refusing to allow her to start hormone treatments to “correct her gender.”

According to Svenska Yle, Nea was introduced to a new group of friends after she moved abroad with her family two summers ago.

It was then that Nea’s appearance and behaviour began to change. Soon after, the teen told her parents that she now identified as a boy and that she wanted to immediately begin hormone therapy and eventually have her breasts completely removed.

“She was only fifteen-years-old,” Nea’s mother said. “We couldn’t agree with her using hormones.”

After trying to calm her daughter, Nea’s mother explained that changing gender is a difficult process that requires careful and time-consuming research.

The teen became increasingly angry at her parents for refusing her request. A few weeks later, with Nea’s consent, a friend contacted the police and filed a criminal report against Nea’s mother and father.

Nea was taken by authorities to an orphanage where she stayed for a few months before being allowed to return to her parents who planned on moving back to Finland with her.

Documents from the orphanage’s report show that Nea’s friends were encouraging her to “break contact with her parents” from the beginning. The girl’s parents told their daughter that she should stop seeing her new friends, but Nea refused.

Not long after, a local transgender activist took Nea to the police station. At the time, the legal custody process was only halfway complete, however, the decision to “start the care process” was made without the consent of her parents.

Nea has now been using testosterone for over eight months and she is no longer in contact with her parents.

“We told her that the door is always open if she wants to return home,” her parents told Yle.