A Detransitioner's $2M Jury Verdict Threatens The Child Mutilation Pipeline

A recent jury verdict marks the first tremor in a building earthquake that may sever the transgender child mutilation pipeline, setting the stage for a host of lawsuits that threaten to end the medical establishment's promotion of "gender-affirming care."

Transgender activists push gender confusion and child mutilation in the name of "civil rights," but we all know the dirty secret: Health care companies make a killing when teenagers sign up for a lifetime of harmful "treatments" before they're able to offer informed consent.

In fact, activists, influencers, teachers, counselors, and medical staff have effectively created a child mutilation pipeline, leading young people to identify as the gender opposite their sex and to take experimental "treatments" to make their body resemble their claimed identity.

Activists and influencers push the idea that a person's inner sense of "gender" overrides his or her biological sex, and that it is "healthy" to change body chemistry in pursuit of this identity. Teachers and counselors mainstream this idea in schools, even working to hide claimed gender identities from parents.

Doctors diagnose kids with "gender dysphoria," the painful and persistent sense of identifying with the gender opposite one's biological sex, and recommend "treatments." Each step along the process involves more harms and often sets minors on the path to more invasive "treatments."

The first step, often called "social transition," involves peers and authority figures using pronouns and names that align with the kid's gender identity. Even this acts as a "powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes," according to psychologist Dr. Stephen B. Levine.

Next, kids who haven't undergone puberty may take gonadotropin-releasing hormones that authorities use to "chemically castrate" sex offenders. Doctors also use the drugs to extend the lives of the elderly by fighting certain cancers that feed upon estrogen or testosterone, yet some minors use them off-label to delay the natural process of puberty.

Tellingly, a Food and Drug Administration study found an "increased risk of [suicidal thoughts] and depression" among minors using these drugs to treat "gender dysphoria."

Not only are these drugs not "fully reversible" as activists claim, but David Gortler, a pharmacologist who previously worked in the Food and Drug Administration, ran a preliminary analysis of FDA data and found 70,000 adverse reports for these "puberty-blocking" drugs. Adverse reactions included hallucinations, bone disorders, cardiac arrest, a clot in the heart, seizures, blindness, and even death.

Minors experiencing puberty or who have gone through puberty may take cross-sex hormones--featuring increased estrogen for boys or increased testosterone for girls. Men who take extra estrogen or other hormones to appear female, for example, face increased risks of infertility, diabetes, testicular and breast cancer, and early death, according to a study published last year.

Levine, the psychologist, warned that cross-sex hormones can have negative effects on fertility, bone density, brain development, and psychosocial well-being.

Finally, some patients suffer the ultimate debilitating "treatment"--the removal of healthy sex organs and their replacement with Frankensteinian approximations of the opposite sex's organs. While some activist groups do not explicitly recommend such surgeries for minors and claim that minors do not undergo them, at least one study found that an estimated 3,678 minors have undergone surgical alterations in a five-year period (including 405 minors between the ages of 12 and 18 who underwent genital surgery).

While the lifelong impacts of these sex-rejection procedures remain less than fully known, patients who undertake each of the drug and surgical "treatments" require lasting care and become patients for life.

Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services released a peer-reviewed study finding "extremely weak evidence" that these interventions have any beneficial effect for children, and that the risks for these interventions are becoming "increasingly undeniable."

If the child mutilation pipeline loses its veneer of scientific legitimacy, it will struggle. Yet, if it loses the ability to make doctors money, the health care industry may reconsider the entire project.

That's where the story of Fox Varian comes in.

New York doctors removed the breasts of Varian, a woman who identified as a man, when she was just 16 years old. On Friday, a New York jury found the two professionals who approved the procedure--a psychologist and a surgeon--liable for medical malpractice, The Epoch Times reported. The jury awarded Varian, now 22 and no longer identifying as a man, $1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering, and an additional $400,000 for future medical expenses.

Varian's case represents the first detransitioner malpractice lawsuit in the nation to go to trial and win, but it will be far from the last.

Back in 2024, Ron Miller, a partner at the law firm Campbell Miller Payne, told me that detransitioner lawsuits will likely result in jury verdicts between $10 and $20 million. Miller's firm represented Varian.

"You're looking at lifelong medical issues that are going to require pharmaceutical drugs and therapies and treatments that just will never end," Miller explained.

Varian's verdict falls short of Miller's prediction--but it proves that detransitioners can win multimillion-dollar judgments.

Miller launched his firm in order to represent detransitioners, and it seems he has no lack of business.

Journalist Benjamin Ryan has a list of 28 different detransitioner lawsuits.

If the horrific scandal that is "gender-affirming care" isn't enough to shame doctors into stopping this insanity, perhaps multimillion-dollar judgments will.

Originally published at The Daily Signal