The election of Donald Trump has accelerated the destruction of the “consensus” among physicians, psychologists, and mental health professionals on how to treat gender confusion in minors.
In truth, it was an artificial consensus, manufactured by advocates of transgenderism who punished those who opposed their viewpoint about gender affirming care for children. The anti-science mountebanks who “canceled” apostates for disagreeing with the idea that children needed to take dangerous drugs and undergo irreversible surgeries to “transition” to another gender are now on the run as the courts and the scientific community are working to undo the damage.
In a landmark court case in Westchester County, New York, a young woman known to the court as “Fox Varian” underwent a “top” surgery when she was 16 years old on the recommendation of her psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn. Like many teens said to be afflicted with gender dysphoria, Varian had a host of psychological problems, including depression, anxiety, and social phobia. She was diagnosed with autism at age 15. She also suffered from “disordered eating and body-image issues,” according to The Free Press.
These “co-morbidities” are almost universally present in children who express a desire to transition to another gender. Einhorn diagnosed Varian with “body dysphoria,” which is different than gender dysphoria. However, the plastic surgeon, Dr. Simon Chin, recommended the “top” surgery, and Chin removed her breasts when she was 16.
Three years after her mastectomy, Varian stopped identifying as transgender and began a process known as detransitioning. In May 2023, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the two principal Westchester County, New York, care providers who oversaw her gender transition: her longtime psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, and Dr. Simon Chin, who performed the mastectomy.
On Friday, a jury in White Plains, New York, awarded Varian $2 million in damages. Varian’s case is the first malpractice suit from a detransitioner to go before a jury, and I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. Represented by personal-injury attorney Adam Deutsch, Varian said she had been injured by the defendants due to their deviation from standard practices and a lack of informed consent. While there are no guarantees in medical malpractice lawsuits, legal experts believe Varian’s victory could inspire a wave of similar cases that would significantly disrupt pediatric gender medicine.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, testified that “Einhorn served as an enabler, repeatedly assuring her that the mastectomy she desired would greatly improve her well-being,” reports The Free Press.
Deacon also testified that “Einhorn browbeat her into consenting to her daughter’s surgery, threatening that she would otherwise commit suicide.”
How many other “Varians” are out there, suffering because of the rabid advocacy of pro-transgender health care providers who took to heart the now-debunked notion that kids who don’t receive gender-affirming care are likely to commit suicide.
In recent years, several high-profile studies and reports that previously served as the foundation for “gender-affirming care” protocols have faced intense scrutiny, leading many experts and health authorities to conclude that the link between medical interventions (like puberty blockers) and reduced suicide risk is not supported by high-quality evidence.
The debate generally centers on two different ways a study can be “debunked”: either through the discovery of methodological flaws in specific papers or through comprehensive systematic reviews that find the overall body of evidence to be unreliable.
Dr. Hilary Cass, former director of the UK’s National Health Service, found that the evidence suggesting puberty blockers or hormones reduce suicide risk is “remarkably weak” and “unreliable.” The Cass Review, published in April 2024, led the NHS to stop the routine prescription of puberty blockers for minors, shifting the focus toward holistic psychological support.
Another major milestone in the fight against doing permanent damage to children was crossed on Tuesday when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) “recommended on Tuesday that its members refrain from performing gender transition procedures on young patients until they reach age 19,” the New York Times reports.
The group’s new position stands in contrast to those taken by most major medical associations in the United States, which endorse a range of treatments for adolescents and teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria. The treatments include puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapies and, in rarer cases, surgeries.
In its statement, the society said the new recommendations were prompted by what it described as a lack of quality research on the long-term outcomes for young people who had undergone surgical interventions like mastectomies and cited “emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms.”
“I would imagine that this is a potentially protective decision for the field, but it also comes at time when we increasingly are seeing governments around the world step in and respond to some of the debates and uncertainty,” said Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a social scientist.
That “uncertainty” is what the debate is all about. Why perform surgeries on children that alter their gender or give them powerful drugs that a growing body of evidence suggests create irreversible damage in children, if you’re not 100% certain that the child will never regret the decision or change their mind later in life?
The battle isn’t over. The ASPS has conducted a strategic retreat, and other medical societies are a long way from changing their policies. The biggest change is in the fact that more and more researchers feel free to study subjects that used to bring professional ostracism and even a loss of employment.
Perhaps as more scientific evidence of the damage done by these treatments emerges, medical organizations will re-examine their positions.
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