The ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Reckoning Begins

By Judson Berger

Friday, February 06, 2026

 

“May Varian’s legal victory open the litigation floodgates!”

 

May it be so.

 

Wesley J. Smith’s petition above followed the recent news that a woman given a double mastectomy when she was 16 was awarded $2 million in a first-of-its-kind malpractice judgment for a detransitioner.

 

The case of 22-year-old Fox Varian was easy to miss; its resolution, highlighted by independent reporter Benjamin Ryan, was mostly ignored in mainstream press. But Varian’s lawsuit against her psychologist and plastic surgeon contained a familiar story for anyone who’s followed these kinds of cases (or who listened to National Review’s Detransitioners podcast series): Her mother was led by medical professionals to believe her daughter’s breasts had to be removed to treat her gender dysphoria; she resisted, then eventually relented.

 

With this judgment, other detransitioners see hope that physicians urging these interventions will eventually be held similarly accountable — and that more patients will come forward.

 

“Frankly, I think that $2 million is not nearly enough to compensate for the damages that these doctors have done to my generation,” Chloe Cole, one of the most visible detransitioners, told Fox News earlier this week. Still, she said the award, in a blue state like New York, bodes well for the rest of the 28 known detransitioner lawsuits (some of which have already been settled or dismissed), including her own. Cole predicted “hundreds, if not thousands,” of additional lawsuits could eventually be filed.

 

Perhaps more important than any individual judgment is the impact such decisions could have on the gender-medicine enterprise as a whole.

 

While the Trump administration and a host of GOP-led states have cracked down on the interventions for minors — surgeries, hormone therapy, puberty blockers — the issue is so intractably politicized in the U.S. that, even with last year’s Supreme Court decision in Skrmetti, it’s easy to envision reforms being rolled back when power changes party hands. (Consider that California’s attorney general just sued a children’s hospital for halting “gender-affirming care” for patients younger than 19; progressives’ commitment to the issue is uncannily unrelenting.) The threat of multimillion-dollar judgments, though, could be a powerful-enough force to rein in the medical industry on a lasting basis.

 

Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but the American Society of Plastic Surgeons this week became the first major medical association to come out against transgender surgeries for minors. As Haley Strack reports, the American Medical Association, while not making a “definitive statement,” agreed that “surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.” The ASPS position statement cited a range of considerations that have been front and center in this debate for years among those urging restraint. Acknowledging “re-examinations” of the field in other countries, the organization said, “Systematic reviews and evidence reassessments have subsequently identified limitations in study quality, consistency, and follow-up alongside emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms.” Importantly, the group advised that “plastic surgeons should be aware that medical decision-making competence among minors is a matter of debate, particularly when patients are experiencing distress and considering treatments with lifelong consequences.”

 

When common sense looks revolutionary, you know you’ve entered the debate over transgender medicine.

 

The government and/or medical professions could have taken a beat at any point over the last decade, clinically assessed the risks, and suspended these practices. Now, the lawyers are swooping in. They’ll do it the hard way. As Wesley writes, what truly menaces the sector’s future is “the threat of major malpractice verdicts and a consequential inability to obtain liability insurance against such cases.”

 

From National Review’s editorial:

 

This was a predictable and predicted outcome. It became inevitable that such things would happen once medical professionals decided en masse to follow fashion and ideology and disregard warnings that they were performing irreversible operations on people too young to consent. . . .

 

Once having tasted victory, [the lawyers] will keep coming, and they will not be gentle. Lawsuits are cold comfort to the victims now struggling through detransitioning, but they deliver justice, and money talks.