Dear Weekend Jolter,
“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 NR’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.”
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.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
This was foreseeable and preventable: The God-Awful Homeless Deaths in Mamdani’s New York City
About those census figures: Americans Vote with Their Feet for Red States
ARTICLES
Claire Abernathy: The Guidelines Are Changing. My Body Never Will
Kamden Mulder: Utah Health Department Issues Flawed Report on ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors as State Weighs Ban
Jim Geraghty: Epstein Files of the Rich and Famous
Jim Geraghty: The Most Erratic President in the World
Dan McLaughlin: Where Does Ron DeSantis Go Next?
James Lileks: Where Ice and ICE Meet
Christian Schneider: The Government Food Pyramid Is All Junk
James Lynch: Bill and Hillary Clinton Agree to Testify in Epstein Probe, Avoiding Contempt Vote
Audrey Fahlberg: Spanberger Admin Warns Virginia Dems Ultra-Blue Congressional Map Could Cause Logistical Nightmare
Stanley Kurtz: James Traub Misreads the Classroom
Brittany Bernstein: Who Is Going to Pay for San Francisco’s Reparations Program?
Rich Lowry: The ‘Stolen Land’ Charge Ignores Most of Human History
Jeffrey Blehar: We All Know Why Trump Is Closing the Kennedy Center for Renovations
Karl Marlantes: The Troubling Trend of Combat-Uniform Creep
Abigail Anthony: The Alzheimer’s Association Discriminated on Race, Sexuality in Allocating Research Funding
John Fund: Latin America Is Shifting Right and Toward the U.S.
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri explains how the Trump administration’s taking a page from the Biden pharma playbook: The Administration’s War on Drug Development
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White throws fistfuls of popcorn at the critics: Melania Outfoxes the Haters
How is it that Metropolitan Museum of Art staff voted to join the United Auto Workers union? Brian Allen explains: In the Glass Hive of Art News: Dark Clouds at the Met, Boston’s MFA
EXCERPTS WERE MEANT TO ROAM FREE
Rich Lowry can’t resist responding to Billie Eilish:
Billie Eilish can be forgiven for being thoughtless — as a pop star, it’s practically part of her job description.
But her anti-ICE declaration at the Grammys that “no one is illegal on stolen land” — met with rapturous applause — pungently expressed a point of view that has significant support on the left and in academia.
The sentiment is a distortion of the history of North America and, more than a shot at President Trump’s immigration policy, an attempt to delegitimize the American project at its root.
There is no doubt that we were, at our worst, brutal and duplicitous in our dealings with Native Americans, and that we were a land-hungry people.
The misapprehension of the simplistic “stolen land” narrative, though, is that, prior to Europeans showing up, peoples in North America had clearly delineated territory with a provenance stretching back into the mists of time. In fact, all was conflict and flux. . . .
If we are guilty of “stealing land,” so is nearly everyone else in history, including Native Americans, who constantly fought and dispossessed one another.
The Iroquois, for instance, gained military superiority by acquiring firearms from the Dutch and English in the 17th century and proceeded to wipe out or displace the Huron, the Neutral Nation, and the Erie. They established what is called the Gunpowder Empire, with its locus in Eastern and Central New York.
For their part, the Comanche originated in the northern Rocky Mountains, then moved into the Great Plains. Their prowess as mounted warriors allowed them to displace the Apache and subordinate the Wichita and establish dominance in a vast region known as Comanchería.
Jim Geraghty has a classic of the Morning Jolt genre, on our erratic president:
While you can read this edition of the newsletter, it is probably best read out loud in the style of the narrator in the Dos Equis commercials, preferably with some upbeat Latin jazz in the background. . . .
He’s the rare kind of immigration hardliner who wants more H-1B visas.
He’s warned that illegal immigrants are taking “Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too” . . . and also proposed giving green cards to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. institution of higher education.
He added his own name to the Kennedy Center . . . and then shut it down for two years for renovations.
He pledged that the addition of a new ballroom to the White House “won’t interfere with the current building” . . . and then tore down the East Wing.
He’s convinced a deep state within the federal government rigged the 2020 presidential election against him while he was president in his first term . . . so he wants to end states’ running their own elections and for the federal government to take over the running of elections nationwide.
He began his presidency by beating Hillary Clinton after a furious, no-holds-barred campaign . . . and now says of the Clintons testifying before the House Oversight Committee, “I think it’s a shame to be honest. I always liked him. Her, eh, she’s a very capable woman. She’s better in debating than some of the other people, I will tell you that. She was smarter, smart woman. I hate to see it in many ways. I hate to see it.”
He’s the man who worked closely with the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo on his first three Supreme Court nominees . . . and who now contends Leo is a “sleazebag” who has ‘the legal system RIGGED.”
Audrey Fahlberg reports on intraparty tensions in Virginia:
Last week, Virginia Democrats trudged ahead with their mid-decade redistricting gambit by appealing a circuit court judge’s ruling blocking their efforts to redraw the commonwealth’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Behind the scenes, Democratic Party leaders in Richmond are hoping that a higher court will rule in their favor and allow the state legislature to put a redistricting constitutional amendment before voters this spring. But even if that effort succeeds, they remain intensely divided over how to proceed with their California-style gerrymandering effort. Right now, Democrats are shopping around multiple maps, two of which would create a ten-to-one margin favoring Democrats and another that would create a nine-to-two margin, sources say.
Administration officials working for newly sworn-in Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger have spent recent days privately cautioning Virginia Democrats about the technical and operational nightmare that might ensue if party leaders move forward with one of the ten-to-one maps over the nine-to-two map, sources familiar with the discussions tell National Review. The current congressional delegation includes six Democrats and five Republicans, and Spanberger will need to sign off on whatever new map the general assembly advances to her desk, assuming the courts allow them to redraw it.
Spanberger officials are warning Virginia Democrats that the proposed ten-to-one maps — the margin currently favored by General Assembly leaders — might create too many split jurisdictions and precincts, causing technical and operational challenges for general registrars, the local officials who oversee Virginia elections.
For example, there are nightmare scenarios in which highly populated jurisdictions like Richmond might be carved into multiple congressional districts, potentially overwhelming general registrars and outdated Virginia election software on such a compressed timeline. Some Democrats worry that even a small precinct error in early voting or on Election Day may accidentally send hundreds of voters incorrect ballots, undermining public faith in elections and paving the way for election-related lawsuits.
Brittany Bernstein explores the puzzling case of the California reparations program with no funders:
In December, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie signed an ordinance establishing a reparations fund for black residents in San Francisco — but no one seems to have any idea who will fund the program.
Lurie, who signed the ordinance after it was unanimously approved by the city’s Board of Supervisors, has stressed that no city funds will go toward the controversial initiative.
Instead, the fund is open to private donations. The mayor has said if money becomes available, the city would work to distribute it to eligible recipients.
However, no nonprofit groups or wealthy individuals appear to have come forward with plans to donate to the fund.
National Review reached out to the mayor’s office to ask if there are any groups or wealthy individuals who have expressed an interest in donating money to the fund, or if the city has any concrete idea where money for the fund will come from. Lurie’s office responded by emphasizing that the city would not be contributing — and left it at that.
“I was elected to drive San Francisco’s recovery, and that’s what I’m focused on every day. We are not allocating money to this fund — with a historic $1 billion budget deficit, we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner,” Lurie’s office told NR in response.
The mayor has shown little enthusiasm for the passage of the ordinance; it was signed into law without a public announcement, press release, or social media post, as local outlets noted.
CODA
Changing things up a bit, here’s Sturgill Simpson, with an assist from Willie Nelson, doing a song called “Juanita.” Sounds lonesome, dun’it?
Thanks for tuning in.