A woman was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a detransitioner.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the lack of mainstream media coverage of a major verdict in a gender “detransitioner” medical-malpractice case, and cover more media misses.
‘Detransitioner’ Wins $2 Million Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit — Media Stay Silent
As readers of National Review will know, a woman who received a double mastectomy at only 16 as an act of “gender-affirming” care was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a detransitioner.
But those who tune in only to the mainstream media will have been left in the dark.
Despite the major implications of the case, zero mainstream outlets have covered it. In fact, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan says he was the only journalist to attend the entirety of the three-week trial in White Plains, N.Y.
The plaintiff, 22-year-old Fox Varian, sued her psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, Ryan reports.
The woman’s mother, Claire Deacon, was allegedly told by her daughter’s psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, that the double mastectomy was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria. Deacon said she was initially insistent that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to the Epoch Times. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying . . . but he was very, very wrong.”
While the idea of her teen daughter having breast removal surgery made her “physically ill,” she says Einhorn made her believe that Varian would be unhappy unless she received “gender-affirming” care.
It was the “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision, Deacon told the jury.
Einhorn and his co-defendant, plastic surgeon Simon Chin, argued that Varian wanted the procedure and that she was at risk of suicide if she did not have a mastectomy.
Chin’s attorney argued that Deacon’s consent was a “critical fact” of the case, while Varian’s lawyers said that the matter in question was not if the surgery should have been performed on her because she was a minor, but if the doctors correctly assumed Varian had gender dysphoria.
But Varian’s attorneys say the defendants did not notify her of the “risks, hazards, and alternatives” before her surgery.
“This case is not about regret,” Varian’s attorney Adam Deutsch said, but about health-care professionals who chose to “empower” a patient instead of treating her.
He argued that the two professionals should have made sure their patient’s other psychological conditions, including anorexia, depression, ADHD, autism, and body dysmorphia were “well-controlled” before approving the surgery.
Now, Varian has been awarded $1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering, and an additional $400,000 for future medical expenses after a jury found that the two health-care providers ignored standards of care and procedural guardrails by pressuring her into having the surgery.
Twenty-eight detransitioner lawsuits are now in different stages of legal proceedings across the U.S., according to the New York Post. But Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit. The case could open the floodgates for lawsuits of its kind.
And yet, the verdict has only been covered by right-wing and independent media, including the Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, the New York Post, the Free Press, and a handful of other outlets.
But from the New York Times? Washington Post? CBS? NBC? Crickets.
It’s no surprise that the media have given little attention to the case, given that mainstream outlets have had a mixed track record on covering the issue. In 2023, the New York Times published a poorly evidenced article titled, “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care.” The article by reporter Maggie Astor relied on biased experts and organizations to claim that concerns over gender-transition procedures for minors are overblown. While she failed to link to any scientific research, Astor made hefty claims about the likelihood that an adolescent, once given puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery, will eventually come to regret the decision.
Two years before the publishing of that article, the Times also declined to run an op-ed submitted by a group of gender-transition experts warning that many transgender clinics have recklessly provided hormone blockers to minors, despite the lack of evidence that such treatment is in their long-term interest.
And the Times isn’t the only outlet guilty of publishing one-sided reporting on the issue.
In 2024, just days after leaked internal documents showed that members of the world’s leading transgender medical organization had privately expressed concerns about the considerable risks involved in prescribing hormone treatments and sex-reassignment surgeries to minors, New York Magazine nonetheless dedicated its cover story to offering the “moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.”
Andrea Long Chu, who identifies as a transgender woman, wrote more than 7,000 words for the magazine on the “Freedom of Sex.”
Children, Chu wrote, are “full members of society who would like to change their sex,” and it “does not matter where this desire comes from.”
That essay was published days after nonprofit Environmental Progress obtained internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in which its experts privately acknowledged that young patients often lack proper understanding about the severity of the life-altering medical decisions they’re making and the possible consequences involved, including sterility, derailed sexual development, and general regret.
This despite the group’s public advocacy in its Standards of Care 8 for those with diagnosed “gender incongruence” to have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, as long as patients can demonstrate “the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”
Coverage of the issue has often been at odds with the opinions of the American electorate, which overwhelmingly supports restrictions on the ability of mentally unwell minors to obtain puberty blockers and hormonal treatments, according to a survey taken last July by the New York Times and Ipsos.
Seventy-one percent of respondents in the poll said they believe children under the age of 18 should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormones.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Federal Agents Launch Tear Gas at Nonviolent Anti-ICE Protesters—Including Children,” Mother Jones reported last week.
While the narrative made the rounds in local and national media, NR’s Noah Rothman explains that framing of the incident doesn’t stand up to scrutiny:
There were children present at the “union-organized protest,” though it is hard to say that their guardians did not suspect they were putting the minors in their care in peril. “I saw one kid in a stroller with a little helmet on,” one protester said of the protest-chic aesthetic to which the marchers committed themselves and their loved ones. The demonstrators were met with pepper-balls, chemical irritants, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets, but only after they had “enveloped” an ICE facility, “crossed the building’s property line, and approached its security gate.” Later, Jefferson Public Radio reported, “Some protesters directly outside the ICE building also appeared to throw objects towards the roof where federal officers fired crowd control munitions.”
Media Misses
• MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, was forced to issue a correction after producers used an AI-enhanced image of Alex Pretti while reporting on his death. After viewers noted the image looked different than the initial image provided by the Service Employees International Union, MS NOW removed and re-edited the Deadline: White House segment on its YouTube account, affixing it with an editor’s note that explained, “MS NOW swapped out the original thumbnail image for this video. The previous thumbnail used was an AI-enhanced image of Alex Pretti.” MS NOW claims that their producers found the image online and used it without realizing it had been doctored.
• The View co-host Ana Navarro described Pretti, who was killed during an encounter with ICE agents last month, as the “perfect guy” during a recent appearance on a CNN panel. Her comments came shortly before video evidence surfaced of Pretti spitting at federal agents and kicking out a government vehicle’s taillight as he yelled expletives days before his death.
“They killed the wrong guy, because this is like the perfect guy,” she said. “Alex Pretti is the guy you’d want to date your daughter, the guy you want your son to grow up to be, a decent human being who was serving humanity, serving sick veterans.”
“There is nothing that has been said about that man that isn’t wonderful. And so they can’t malign him,” Navarro added.
• The BBC was in hot water yet again this week, this time after broadcasters left out any mention of “Jewish people” when introducing its Holocaust Memorial Day coverage. The outlet introduced its coverage by explaining the day commemorates the “six million people murdered by the Nazi regime more than 80 years ago.” UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation co-chairman Lord Pickles told the Times that “this kind of obfuscation was common during the Soviet control of parts of Europe” and “for the BBC to use it today is shocking.”
The BBC apologized in a message posted online: “During widespread coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day, there were some instances where we said ‘six million people’ or ‘six million mostly Jewish people’ had been murdered by the Nazi regime. These were incorrectly worded for which we apologise. They should have referred to ‘six million Jewish people.”