We must put an end to child mutilation

Fox Varian is not a household name, but it should be. Fox and her mother just won a civil suit last Friday against the doctors who presided over her double mastectomy when she was only 16 years old. The jury awarded her $2 million in damages, citing malpractice on the part of her doctors. According to The Free Press, this case is “the first malpractice suit from a detransitioner to go before a jury,” and “legal experts believe that Varian’s victory could inspire a wave of similar cases that would significantly disrupt pediatric gender medicine.”

Fox Varian’s case is tragic on a number of levels, not least because she had the unfortunate experience of psychological problems during a period when destructive gender ideology had a stranglehold on the medical profession. Throughout the 2010s, a pernicious ideology introduced standards of care that inflicted immense harm to the bodies of minor children struggling with gender identity issues.

That standard goes by the appalling euphemism “gender-affirming care,” and it involves medical professionals instructing gender-confused minors to ignore their biological sex, transition socially by adopting opposite-sex pronouns and names, suppress their sexual development with puberty blockers, take fertility-destroying opposite-sex hormones, and, finally, undergo surgical procedures that destroy healthy sexual organs.

Anyone with a scintilla of common sense must see that these measures are not “gender-affirming care” but “body-disfiguring abuse.” Nevertheless, transgender propaganda effectively overwhelmed common sense so thoroughly that medical authorities themselves have been hoodwinked. Countless doctors now believe and propagate the fiction that destroying healthy body parts can somehow heal a broken mind. In the process, medical providers reject the Hippocratic Oath’s pledge to “do no harm” and instead inflict incalculable and irreversible damage to the bodies of minor children.

Sadly, Fox Varian got caught up in this maelstrom of ideology, and so did her medical providers. Now she is mutilated for life. In court, she testified that she regretted her surgery immediately after the bandages were removed. Now six years later, as an adult, she is coming to terms with the reality of her doctors’ malpractice. In place of her healthy breasts, she now has “scarring, lack of sensation in her nipples, and nerve pain where her breasts once were. She will never be able to nurse an infant.” In court, she testified, “No amount of reconstruction is ever going to bring back what I lost.”

Fox Varian’s mother testified that she was reluctant to consent for her minor child to undergo a double mastectomy. She expressed her reluctance to her daughter’s psychologist before the procedure. She also testified that the psychologist “browbeat her into consenting to her daughter’s surgery, threatening that she would otherwise commit suicide.” The mother said she never would have consented to the surgery if her daughter’s psychologist hadn’t manipulated her with the specter of suicide.

Ironically, there is little evidence that Varian was suicidal before her surgery. She struggled with anxiety and depression before the procedure, and doctors led her to believe that the surgery would heal her psychological distress. But that didn’t happen. The surgery only made matters worse. The psychologist’s own case file shows that “he never once saw a cause to note that Varian was suicidal until after the operation.”

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of all this is how preventable this tragedy should have been. There was a faithful minority of voices warning about the destruction that was being wrought upon minor children because of the horrific “standards of care” adopted by medical authorities. Dr. Paul McHugh, for example, warned in 2014 that the research shows that surgical interventions don’t cure co-morbidities like depression, anxiety, or anorexia. In many cases, surgery makes them worse.

Others, such as Ryan Anderson in his 2018 book When Harry Became Sally, warned that scientific studies did not support “gender-affirming care,” and he documented the heart-rending testimonies of numerous detransitioners. He warned that this unscientific, ideological experiment on bodies of minor children would not go well. What did Anderson get in return for debunking transgender propaganda? His book was banned from Amazon.

Faithful voices like McHugh, Anderson, and others were warning about harm that was coming to the likes of Fox Varian, but the transgender ideologues didn’t want you to hear their warnings. And it worked for a while.

But now we can hope the fever is finally breaking. People are beginning to see the enormous harm that has been perpetrated on children too young to give their consent to these procedures. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has just released new guidance warning doctors against performing gender-transition surgeries on minors. And now—because of Fox Varian’s courageous stand in court—there is a reckoning on the way to the medical providers who profited from these ghoulish procedures. That reckoning has been a long time in coming. Thank God it may finally be here.