Last week’s $2 million verdict in favor of a 22-year-old detransitioning woman suing her doctors for performing a double mastectomy on her at the age of 16 is the first such case to go before a jury and is expected to set a legal precedent for liability regarding gender-affirming care for minors.The case of Fox Varian v. Kenneth Einhorn PhD, et al, is destined for the history books and will set future precedent for holding medical professionals accountable in the controversial practice of gender-affirming care for minors. Just the threat of such major malpractice verdicts will certainly impact insurers’ desire to cover these practices, thus causing a dramatic pause, if not cessation, in these procedures.
According to Benjamin Ryan, one of just two reporters who covered the trial which took place in a White Plains, New York courtroom, Fox Varian, 22, claimed that she was left disfigured for life after her longtime psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, and Dr. Simon Chin, performed a double mastectomy on her in 2019. Varian claimed they deviated from standard practices and lack of informed consent when she was just a teenager.
Varian, whose parents split when she was just seven years old, had a long list of mental health problems ranging from gender dysphoria to anxiety, autism, major depression and anorexia. She began questioning her gender at the age of 15 when she decided to change her birth name from Isabella to Gabriel, then cut her hair short and began binding her breasts. Not long after, she changed her name once again to Rowan and began telling people she was transitioning from female to male.
Instead of addressing her obvious mental health issues, just 11 months after her gender confusion arose, doctors pushed her into undergoing surgery to remove her breasts which left her in “searing” nerve pain.
Typical of this case, and many of the more than 30 similar cases currently making their way through the court systems, Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, testified that she was against the surgery and only consented when doctors agreed with her worry that her daughter might kill herself if she did not get the surgery.
As Joshua Arnold of the Washington Stand reports, Deacon told the jury that Einhorn used the threat of suicide to pressure her into signing the necessary consent forms for the surgery.
“I was scared out of my wits by the things that Dr. Einhorn was so confident in repeatedly telling me and my daughter,” said Deacon. “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.”
The surgery was performed in 2019 and Varian is described as having regrets as soon as the bandages were removed.
As Arnold reports, “Far from helping cure her mental illnesses, her mother recalled, ‘she still had all the same issues,’ but now she started cutting herself, too. But shame and cognitive dissonance kept Varian from expressing this regret openly for three years, when she stopped identifying as a male and re-embraced her biological sex — becoming what is known as a ‘detransitioner.’”
It was at this juncture that Varian filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Kenneth Einhorn and Dr. Simon Chin.
“I was 16. And I was really, really mentally ill, obviously,” Varian testified at the trial. “I obviously wasn’t mature enough to make the decision to have surgery. And I certainly wasn’t mature enough to handle the aftermath.”
After a three-week trial, the jury agreed and awarded her $1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering, as well as $400,000 to cover future medical expenses. The jury assigned 70 percent of the blame on Einhorn and 30 percent on Chin and divided the penalty accordingly.
As attorney and Senior Fellow and the Center of Human Exeptionalism Wesley J. Smith explains, even though the case did not challenge the general propriety of such “care” of minors with gender dysphoria, it’s still an important verdict.
“This verdict is an important development in the great cause of protecting gender-confused minors from being subjected to irreversible procedures from which they can never be made whole,”
Smith writes. “Why? Trial lawyers! I know this community well. Hell, I was one! Most are liberal politically, but if they smell money in the water, they will sue the ‘gender-affirming’ care industry into the ground just as they do other business sectors with deep pockets.”
Which is just another way of putting an end to this horrendous practice.
“I have always believed that the civil justice system — the threat of major malpractice verdicts and a consequential inability to obtain liability insurance against such cases — would ultimately cause the gender ideological medical sector’s deeply-to-be-desired demise,” he writes. “May Varian’s legal victory open the litigation floodgates!”
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