After a historic trial, a civil jury in New York state has awarded malpractice damages to a detransitioner, the first such judgment for victims of transgender ideology’s medical experimentation. Fox Varian, a 22-year-old woman, sued her former psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, and plastic surgeon, Simon Chin, alleging that they deviated from standard medical practice and informed consent in rushing her into a double mastectomy at the age of 16. The verdict in her favor signaled “The end of the transgender experiment,” proclaimed Claremont Institute Vice President Andrew Beck.

After a three-week trial before the New York Supreme Court (a trial-level court) in Westchester County, a civil jury awarded Varian $2 million in damages, according to independent journalist Ben Ryan, who covered the case in full. After deliberating for more than five hours, the jury awarded Varian $1.6 million for past and future suffering and $400,000 for future medical expenses. The jury assigned 70% of the blame to Einhorn and 30% to Chin and divided the penalty proportionately.

A New York civil jury is “composed of six persons” and is “not required” to reach a unanimous verdict, but only a “five-sixths” majority.

The jurors heard the tragic tale of a 15-year-old girl who began to question her female identity during sessions with Einhorn, her psychologist. She changed her name from Isabella to Gabriel, then again to Rowan, as she cut her hair short, began binding her breasts, and told people she was transgender. This all happened in the space of two months. And, only 11 months after this social transition began, Varian received a double mastectomy in December 2019 at the age of 16.

Einhorn ushered Varian through this rapid transition process despite a collage of underlying mental health struggles stemming from deeply personal rifts. Her parents separated when Varian was seven, and a three-year custody battle left her estranged from her father. Varian suffered from depression, anxiety, social phobia, an eating disorder, and body-image issues. She was also diagnosed with autism and transferred schools frequently.

“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.”

Varian experienced instant regret from the surgery, as soon as the bandages were removed. 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’s so hard to face that you are disfigured for life,” she mourned. “No amount of reconstruction is ever going to bring back what I lost.” Varian discovered the hard way that even surgery could not permanently change her sex, but it could leave her with permanent scars, loss of sensation, nerve pain, and the knowledge that she will never nurse an infant child.

Despite this striking testimony, Varian’s lawyer, Adam Deutsch, did not attempt to challenge gender transition procedures for minors as a comprehensive practice. He agreed with the defense attorneys that breast removal surgery was an appropriate treatment for certain minors’ mental illness. Yet such a shocking admission may have been necessary to work within New York state’s excessively permissive laws. Instead, the argument was that Varian was rushed into permanent surgery without proper care or communication.

“They had every opportunity to slow this down, to do the work, to follow the standards, to say ‘Not yet,’ to ask questions, to explore,” Deutsch argued. “And instead, they did nothing. They abandoned all of the guardrails and then tried to sell to you that no guardrails exist. And a vulnerable child paid the price.”

Indeed, the referral process for Varian’s surgery was far from intensive. Einhorn wrote a referral letter that ran only three paragraphs, and Chin met with Varian for a total of two 30-minute appointments in the nine weeks before the scheduled surgery. Deutsch argued that both physicians failed to provide essential caveats: that the surgery might not meet expectations, might not address psychological struggles, and might induce regret. However, each physician countered that they had done so.

Even Einhorn’s short letter contained multiple errors of omission and commission. He failed to mention two of Varian’s diagnoses, major depression and anorexia, which Chin said should be in such a letter, even if they are under control. Einhorn also wrote that Varian’s school attendance showed some “moderate success” at anxiety management, despite the fact that she had withdrawn from school. Most of all, Einhorn wrote not that Varian had gender dysphoria, but that it was body dysmorphia, which is a separate diagnosis widely accepted as a reason not to perform plastic surgery.

Einhorn attempted to explain this last oversight with self-refuting statement, “I’m not a verbal thinker.” And Chin explained his failure to raise any questions about this error by saying the rest of the letter made it clear which diagnosis Einhorn meant.

Yet Deutsch called a surprising expert witness who offered damning testimony on this point. “That letter to me is a stop sign,” testified Dr. Loren Schechter, president-elect of the World Professional Organization for Transgender Health (WPATH), an organization of activist physicians that has convinced major medical associations to adopt their “standards of care.”

“I looked at this case really hoping — and even with an expectation that there would be enough — to support Dr. Chin’s care. And I couldn’t do that,” Schechter said. Even by WPATH’s pro-transgender standards, the care Varian received was sub-par. The whole case for surgery rested on “assumption and inference,” he continued, and Einhorn failed to realize that “surgery in and of itself is not a treatment or a mechanism to prevent suicide.”

Speaking of suicide, this familiar specter raised its grim visage yet again in Varian’s case, as Einhorn used the threat of suicide as a verbal cudgel with which to browbeat Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, into signing the necessary consent forms. Deacon testified that Einhorn once bellowed at her, “You’re not in reality, Mom!”

“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.” On the stand, Einhorn denied making suicide threats but also admitted he didn’t really believe Varian was at serious risk of suicide. In his notes, Einhorn never noted that Varian was suicidal until after her breasts were surgically removed.

According to Ryan, the nearest the trial came to a “smoking gun” was evidence of two third-party consultations that should have brought all discussion of surgery to a screeching halt. After Varian told Einhorn that she wanted a mastectomy, he referred her to Pride Center, an LGBT-focused center in Albany. Varian and her mother made the two-hour journey twice.

On her second visit to the Pride Center in July 2019, Varian told a staffer that she “had continued to question” her gender identity and felt “lost at this time.” However, she confessed a fear that she “would lose credibility by discussing this with others” and felt “pressure to decide on a male identity versus a female identity by family, peers, and culture.”

Despite making the referral, Einhorn never requested these notes. He admitted that the act of writing his referral letter, without knowing this information, departed from the standard of care. Chin acknowledged that if he had known about these notes, “I would not have proceeded with the surgery.” Both defendants agreed that a patient’s gender identity should be stable for at least six months prior to a gender transition surgery, but Varian was questioning her transgender identity only four months before the surgery.

So, what went wrong? Why did two health care providers both miss the signs that Varian was less invested in her transgender identity than was necessary for surgery, even by their own pro-transgender standards? Part of the problem seems to lie in the dominant model of “gender-affirming care,” which requires physicians to unquestioningly bend to the ever-shifting feelings of a confused adolescent. As Einhorn put it in a recorded call, “I don’t question people when they want to go through this.”

Varian’s case is the first trial-level verdict to expose how much injury the “gender-affirming care” model can wreak on a young woman’s body. Nancy McDermott, director of Genspect USA, an organization that supports detransitioners, argued that the verdict was “important because it established that ‘affirmation-only’ or rapid-transition models are not protected from malpractice claims when clinicians bypass thorough assessments, informed consent, or coordination.”

“This has always been ‘about the Benjamins,’” declared Quena Gonzalez, FRC’s senior director of Government Affairs, in a statement to The Washington Stand. “Medicalizing some men and women’s discomfort with their sex and transforming them into patients for life dependent on medical experiments is, it turns out, incredibly lucrative.”

Gonzalez warned that transgender ideology poses an anti-Christian, spiritual threat to America. “Spiritually, this issue is about both crippling the individuals subjected to these experiments, physically and emotionally, and crippling society epistemologically,” he said. “If we can force everyone to admire the emperor’s new clothes by insisting that they address people by false pronouns, or by forcing people to accept false sexual identities, then there’s probably no end to what we can force everyone to believe, say, and do.”

Thus, Gonzalez added, “This is not just about money; it’s about power. And the cracks in the dam are just starting to appear.”

According to McDermott, a jury verdict constitutes just such a crack. She found great significance in the fact that Varian’s verdict “was the first to be decided by a jury — in other words, by normies: people with no skin in the game, just an idea of what constitutes reasonable behavior or common sense.”

The verdict provides hope to nearly 30 civil suits brought by detransitioners across the U.S. Now that the dam is broken, they may also reach favorable verdicts. “This gives me even more hope that I will get justice for myself,” reacted detransitioner Chloe Cole. If detransitioners win enough malpractice lawsuits, it could drive up insurance costs for doctors who carry out gender transition procedures on minors, making it cost-prohibitive for the profiteering practice to continue.

“The bad news is that none of this is new,” Gonzalez concluded. “But the Good News of the Gospel — ‘gospel’ literally means ‘good news’ — is that God has been restoring true identities and shattered lives since the very beginning. Yes, the deceiver bruised the heel of Eve’s offspring, but Jesus has come to crush the deceiver’s head, to destroy deception, and to restore that which has been marred and broken into an unfathomable beautiful trophy of grace.”