OPINION:
The transgender agenda is in a bind. Fox Varian, 22, recently won a first-of-its-kind medical malpractice court victory against providers of so-called gender-affirming care.
An entire industry has formed around taking girls and giving them the appearance of boys through expensive and highly destructive cosmetic surgery. Being a man is about more than mere appearance, just as womanhood is more than a collection of superficial characteristics. Many who go through this hollow visual transformation are filled with regret.
When she was just 16, Ms. Varian had a life-changing double mastectomy that she is trying to reverse. She sued the parties responsible for malpractice, and a jury in White Plains, New York, awarded her $2 million in damages.
Beset by gender dysphoria as a teenager six years ago, Ms. Varian turned to the medical profession for help. According to the lawsuit, psychologist Kenneth Einhorn and surgeon Simon Chin persuaded her to have her breasts surgically amputated. Now, she says she is “disfigured for life” and is trying to detransition.
Ms. Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, said the experts assured her that the mastectomy was the solution and that her daughter was at risk of suicide if she didn’t have it. “I think it was a scare tactic. I don’t believe it was malice. I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong,” Ms. Deacon was quoted as saying by The Epoch Times.
Increased suicide risk is a fraught but unproven claim by the LGBTQ activist lobby in defense of allowing these major procedures to be performed on minors. Last week, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons revised its guidance on the issue.
In 2019, the organization opposed state efforts to impose age restrictions on these operations, but the new guidance acknowledges the lack of credible evidence that surgical interventions, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have long-term benefits for minors. In a huge about-face, it now says surgery should be deferred until the prospective patient is “at least 19 years old.”
Opponents of “gender-affirming care” for minors rightly doubt a child’s ability to make well-informed and reasoned decisions about such life-altering procedures. Neither the jury award nor the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ decision was what the radical transgender lobby and its enablers in the psychiatric and surgical industries wanted to hear.
Chloe Cole, now 21, was just 15 in 2019, when she similarly underwent a double mastectomy, which has been sanitized with the euphemism “top surgery.” She applauded the jury’s award in Ms. Varian’s case, but she said the financial penalty wasn’t nearly punitive enough. She hopes it will spawn more lawsuits from others disfigured by the highly lucrative transgender-industrial complex.
“To every psychologist, physician, surgeon, and medical board that has pushed for transgenderism in children, the kids you’ve mutilated will see you in court,” she said on X.
Ms. Cole has launched a malpractice lawsuit of her own, joining a list of at least two dozen such lawsuits headed to trial. This could be the beginning of the end for an industry that tries to create customers for life with drugs and the need for lifelong subsequent medical care.
Legislative efforts are advancing at the federal and state levels to impose age restrictions to thwart these schemes. That may not be necessary if the medical industry, out of a desire to preserve its finances, decides to stop causing harm.
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