A woman who underwent a double mastectomy at age 16 as part of a gender transition has won $2 million in damages against her medical providers, a groundbreaking verdict that bodes ill for the billion-dollar “gender-affirming care” business.
A jury in White Plains, New York, handed a victory to Fox Varian in her 2023 malpractice claim against psychologist Kenneth Einhorn and plastic surgeon Simon Chin.
The case marks the first time a jury has ruled in the case of a detransitioner suing over gender-change procedures performed before age 18.
The $2 million award last week represents a “historic medical malpractice victory,” said Ms. Varian’s attorneys at Fiedler Deutsch LLP.
“The jury’s verdict in favor of Fox underscores a fundamental principle of medical malpractice law: all patients, regardless of the nature of their treatment, are entitled to medical care that meets established and accepted standards of practice,” the New York law firm said in a press release Monday.
The firm emphasized that the “case was not a statement or referendum on the appropriateness of gender-affirming care for adults or minors. Instead, it was about whether physicians adhered to their professional and ethical obligations when providing that care to Fox,” the company added.
Even so, the ruling delivered an undeniable blow to an industry already reeling from the Trump administration’s crackdown on “gender-affirming care” for minors, which has prompted as many as 20 hospital chains to shutter their pediatric gender clinics rather than risk having their Medicaid funding pulled.
More verdicts are expected to follow.
At least two dozen lawsuits have been filed by other detransitioners, the term for those who once identified as the opposite sex, but then changed their minds after being treated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgical procedures.
Chloe Cole, who’s suing Kaiser Permanente in California after having her breasts removed at age 15 as part of a gender transition, called the landmark ruling a “huge leap for the detransitioner movement.
“Every doctor and clinic involved in this fad should be very afraid for what comes next,” she said in a statement. “They knew what they were doing when they performed mastectomies on perfectly healthy teenagers. Two million dollars is nothing compared to the personal cost of childhood mutilation, but this verdict gives real hope to the next generation of detransitioners seeking justice.”
The Westchester County Supreme Court judge placed the case file under seal at the start of the trial, but the three-week proceeding was attended by independent journalist Benjamin Ryan, whose report was published Sunday in The Free Press.
Ms. Varian’s saga is a familiar one: a teen struggling with mental health issues is fast-tracked into “gender-affirming care” by providers who convince her parents that gender transition drugs or surgeries are necessary to protect her from suicide.
Now 22, Ms. Varian was already undergoing therapy for anxiety, depression and social phobia when she began identifying as the opposite sex at age 15, cutting her hair, binding her breasts, and changing her name from Isabella to Gabriel to Rowan.
Her medical providers cleared her for a double mastectomy in December 2019, 11 months after she began her social transition. At 19, she reversed course and began identifying as female.
“It’s so hard to face that you are disfigured for life,” Ms. Varian told jurors, as reported in The Free Press.
The defense emphasized that the girl’s mother, Claire Deacon, is a licensed nurse and that she signed a consent form authorizing the surgery, but Ms. Deacon testified that she was terrified by Dr. Einhorn’s warnings about suicide.
“I was scared out of my wits by the things that Dr. Einhorn was so confident in repeatedly telling me and my daughter,” Ms. Deacon said. “Without Dr. Einhorn repeatedly, emphatically, consistently pushing me, telling me that this was going to, quote, ‘cure’ my daughter, make everything better in her life, I would never have made that decision.”
On the stand, Dr. Einhorn “denied browbeating Deacon with suicide threats and said he never told them the surgery would be a panacea,” the article said.
Dr. Loren Schechter, president-elect of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, testified that the psychologist broke with the organization’s standards of care by referring Ms. Varian for surgery with a diagnosis of body dysmorphia, as opposed to gender dysphoria.
The jury’s award consisted of $1.6 million for “past and future pain” and $400,000 for future medical expenses related to undoing damage from the “gender-affirming care.”
Charles LiMandri, a partner at the California law firm LiMandri & Jonna representing several detransitioners, including Ms. Cole, said the claims made in the Varian case mirror those found in other lawsuits.
“Therefore, I would expect that these cases should continue to yield similar favorable results for the plaintiff victims of what is considered the worst medical scandal of modern times,” Mr. LiMandri told The Washington Times. “Consequently, the recent decision in the Varian case should be seen as a dire warning to all the so-called ‘gender affirming’ doctors, and their medical malpractice insurance carriers, that the financial risks and the risks to these activist doctors’ careers and reputations are looming large against them.”
The impact of the decision is already reverberating worldwide.
The Women’s Forum Australia, which opposes pediatric gender transition treatment, said the decision “marks the beginning of a broader legal reckoning for a medical model that has prioritised ideology over evidence-based care and the wellbeing of vulnerable young people.”
“For those who have been harmed, this case offers something long overdue: recognition that what happened to them matters and that accountability is finally following,” the forum said in a statement.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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