At the end of last month a malpractice lawsuit was ruled on that opens the door for more challenges to the medical industry’s rush to push patience into transgender surgeries and chemical “therapies.” The lawsuit awarded a 16-year-old girl $2 million for being hastened into life-altering “therapies.” After a couple of weeks have followed, the ruling appears to be setting off a potential wave of new lawsuits by more detransitioners that could price most transgender treatments out of the market.
More lawsuits could not only bankrupt the programs that have done more than offer transgender therapies to patients, but they also aggressively pushed them in part by not clearly letting their patients know the cost of transitioning, and they lowered the previous standards for determining if this type of treatment is needed after all.
On January 30, the first-ever verdict in a medical malpractice suit filed by a gender detransitioner was handed down, with a New York jury awarding 22-year-old Fox Varian $1.6 million in damages and $400,000 for future medical expenses. Varian had sued her psychologist and surgeon for uncritically diagnosing her with gender dysphoria and giving her a double mastectomy when she was just 16 years old.
Although the award was less than the $8 million sought by Varian and her attorneys, legal observers say the verdict likely marks a tipping point for the gender-affirming medical industry.
Within days of the announcement, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) issued a statement recommending that surgeons now delay “gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery” until patients are at least 19 years old.
Their conclusion? “Available evidence suggests that a substantial proportion of children with prepubertal onset gender dysphoria experience resolution or significant reduction of distress by the time they reach adulthood, absent medical or surgical intervention.”