When our grandchildren study this period of time in school and learn about the rise of transgender ideology that captivated leftists, the legacy media, and many younger people for nearly two decades, January 2026 will be one of several key turning points in the effort to protect minors from poor life-altering decisions about their bodies.
For the first time ever, a jury found New York doctors liable for medical malpractice on Jan. 30. Fox Varian, 22, won a $2 million decision in a landmark lawsuit against a surgeon and psychologist for facilitating her double mastectomy when she was just 16. The young detransitioner was awarded $1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering and an additional $400,000 for future medical expenses.
This is the first detransitioner malpractice lawsuit in the nation to go to trial and result in a win. The significance cannot be overstated.
Varian’s lawsuit claimed that her providers failed to obtain adequate informed consent regarding the risks of a double mastectomy. The case highlights just how vague medical practitioners have been about the risks associated with “gender-affirming care,” something the whole of the medical community only recently embraced as not just advanced but necessary, even life-saving.
Ripple effect
The real-world effects of Varian’s win were swift, especially in the medical community. Within days, two major medical associations walked back their previous positions on providing gender-affirming care for minors. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to recommend against gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
“ASPS concludes there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents. ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old,” the Feb. 3 statement reads.
This quick reversal is significant – the nearly 100-year-old organization represents more than 11,000 physicians.
In a statement to National Review, the American Medical Association said that, because “the evidence for gender-affirming surgical intervention in minors is insufficient for us to make a definitive statement, … the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”
It’s amazing how quickly medical standards shifted, not because science evolved, but because the possibility of a medical malpractice lawsuit hangs overhead.
Medical community dominoes
Hospital systems were next to scale back care, both in response to the Varian lawsuit and the Trump administration’s announcement in late 2025 that it would pull Medicare or Medicaid funding from any hospital that provides gender-related treatment for minors. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a Dec. 18, 2025, statement that “the federal government will do everything in its power to stop unsafe, irreversible practices that put our children at risk.”
On Feb. 18, New York University Langone Health closed its transgender youth health program. “Given the recent departure of our medical director, coupled with the current regulatory environment, we made the difficult decision to discontinue our Transgender Youth Health Program,” NYU Langone said in a statement. “We are committed to helping patients in our care manage this change. This does not impact our pediatric mental health care programs, which will continue.”
Baystate Health, the largest healthcare system in western Massachusetts, announced in a letter to patients on Feb. 9 that it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to those under 18, citing Trump’s funding announcement. “This decision offers patients the specialized expertise and continuity of care they need and deserve and reflects the evolving regulatory landscape that threatens hundreds of millions of dollars in hospital Medicaid and Medicare funding,” the health system said.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center also discontinued surgeries for transgender adults, citing “operational limitations.”
These reversals are more significant than many conservatives may realize. Gender transition surgeries and treatments for minors were popular among liberals, robustly supported by the Biden administration, and the medical community largely marched in lockstep behind these practices.
As the Atlantic reported in 2025, doctors often asked parents of gender-confused children if they would rather have a “dead son than a live daughter,” a double bind that was too terrifying to navigate, despite little evidence on the other side of cross-sex hormones and reassignment surgery that life-altering medical transitions prevented suicidal thoughts and created happy transgender children.
In weeks, that shifted among medical professionals, a sea change that will ultimately protect hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of children from making life-altering decisions they will ultimately regret. “American doctors are no longer united on the wisdom of medicalizing gender dysphoria in minors,” Helen Lewis also wrote in the Atlantic on Feb. 12.
“The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here,” Jesse Singal wrote in the New York Times on Feb. 24. “The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a ‘policy statement’ on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naive understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.”
I couldn’t agree more.
More lawsuits are coming
Varian’s win against providers who advised and performed gender-affirming care for a minor will undoubtedly result in a surge of similar lawsuits from detransitioners. A 2019-2023 study cited in an HHS report found that nearly 14,000 minors received gender-affirming care and over 5,700 had surgeries.
On Feb. 11, the Texas Supreme Court heard the case of a detransitioner from Fort Worth, where I live. According to Soren Aldaco’s lawsuit, her counselor recommended Aldaco for a double mastectomy in 2021, after Aldaco had been dabbling in wanting to live as a boy. She underwent the surgery at 19 and suffered complications. Aldaco ultimately detransitioned but didn’t file a medical negligence suit until May 2023.
“What was done to Ms. Aldaco and many people like her is a medical scandal,” Aldaco’s attorney, John Ramer, told justices. “Kids and young adults suffering from severe psychological distress went looking for help, and what they found is medical providers saying that what’s going to liberate them from their distress is pumping them full of cross-sex hormones and cutting off their body parts.”
Providers argue that Aldaco was past the limitations period to hold them accountable for healthcare liability. Unfortunately, much of the suit seems to focus on limitations, rather than the core issue — medical malpractice for gender-affirming care. But it is a pertinent example of just how prevalent these suits are about to be throughout the U.S.
Attorneys with the Dhillon Law Group, LiMandri & Jonna, and the Center for American Liberty sent a letter of intent to sue Kaiser Permanente on behalf of perhaps conservatives’ most outspoken detransitioner, Chloe Cole, for transgender-related medical care, including puberty blockers, testosterone, and a double mastectomy, during her teenage years.
Cole has testified repeatedly to lawmakers about the harms of gender-affirming care for children. In February, a Missouri lawmaker introduced the “Chloe Cole Act,” federal legislation that would block gender-related medical procedures for minors — a welcome step to continuing to protect children.
Another welcome voice on this issue, perhaps more consequential than any American lawmaker, has been the writer of the famed Harry Potter series, JK Rowling. After news of Varian’s lawsuit broke, she posted on X a scathing rebuke conservatives should emulate.
“As more and more detransitioners arrive in court, the public will learn the full extent of the harm done to kids in the name of an ideology,” she wrote. “Clinicians performing these ‘treatments’ will go down in history as barbarous activists who betrayed a sacred oath: to do no harm. But we should never forget how many people outside the medical profession urged these young people on, gleefully assuring them that anyone advising caution was an evil bigot.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND SOCIAL TRENDS HAVE LED TO MAJOR REVERSAL IN TRANSGENDER DEBATE
I hope by the time our grandchildren are in school, this period of time will be viewed with cynicism and relief that common sense prevailed. So much so that they will question how children who couldn’t legally smoke a cigarette or serve in the military were encouraged to change their bodies in a form of care that was eventually dubbed medical malpractice.
And one lawsuit helped turn the tide.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist for USA Today. She lives in Texas with her four children.
