The Patriot Post® · The Counterfeiting of Males and Females Is Medical Malpractice

By Walt Heyer

The insanity of cutting off the breasts of teenage girls in the name of “transgenderism” has finally been vindicated.

A White Plains, N.Y., jury held a psychologist and a surgeon liable for medical malpractice for removing the healthy breasts of Fox Varian, then a 16-year-old girl, and awarded her $2 million in total damages — $1.6 million for pain and suffering and $400,000 for future medical expenses.

Congratulations to her and her attorney, Adam Deutsch, and thanks to the jury for getting it right.

Ms. Varian’s justice arrived at 22 years of age and she, like me, is no longer identifying as “transgender.”

This legal victory marks a pivotal moment for what Elon Musk predicts “will be thousands of court cases of children who were mutilated by evil doctors, modern day Mengeles.” Psychologists and surgeons who affirm young people in counterfeit identities and facilitate medical interventions deserve to be held accountable.

This insane madness euphemistically called “gender-affirming care” — stopping natural puberty, administering cross-sex hormones, and removing the breasts of females or the genitalia of males — in my view and life experience, is medical malpractice. Surgeries like mine 40 years ago were wrong then and are wrong now.

In Finland, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, chief adolescent psychiatrist at Finland’s Tampere University Hospital, studied the outcomes of “gender-affirming care” provided for minors there and said, based on the scientific evidence, “gender-affirming care” for minors is dangerous and provides no benefit.

Trauma at the Root

In “Embracing God’s Design,” co-authored with Jennifer Bauwens, Ph.D., we lay out the role trauma plays in the lives of people who adopt a transgender identity. Ms. Varian’s catalog of traumas is dramatic in its number:

“Her parents separated when Varian was seven, and a three-year custody battle left her estranged from her father. Varian suffered from depression, anxiety, social phobia, an eating disorder, and body-image issues. She was also diagnosed with autism and transferred schools frequently.”

The gender clinics’ therapists and surgeons do not want to acknowledge the underlying disorders and traumas that are responsible for the person’s disordered thoughts and behaviors.

My childhood experience is remarkably similar in many ways to Ms. Varian’s — childhood traumas, rush to surgery, ineffective and harmful procedures.

It Happened to Me

My grandmother started cross-dressing me in secret and affirming how good I looked as a girl starting at age 4. Two years later, when my father found out what his mother-in-law was doing to his boy, he thought using physical discipline to the point of welts and bruises would “man” me up. Another family member sexually abused me. All of this happened before I was 10.

At age 40ish, after decades of cross-dressing, I was convinced that I needed cross-sex hormones. I sought the advice of the premier gender specialist at the time, Dr. Paul Walker, about my ever-present mental confusion. I told him about the abuse I suffered as a child, but his response was that it didn’t matter. After a couple of visits, Walker diagnosed me with “gender dysphoria” and advised me to take the next step in treatment, called “sex change” surgery.

I had the surgery and lived in a female identity for eight years. From that crazy experience, I learned some important truths. Gender/sex remains fixed and innate from the moment of conception. I didn’t “transition” from man to woman. Hormones and surgery are feckless in changing who God made a person to be. The offensive truth is that there is no such thing as a “transgender” person or even a “detransitioner.” When I wanted to reclaim my male identity, I didn’t need to “detransition” because I had never stopped being a man.

Starting with my first published articles in 2015, I have advocated for protecting children from the reckless diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” a diagnosis that fast tracks access to hormone therapy and unnecessary surgery.

What we need now is a “fast track” for medical malpractice cases to slow down, even stop, the insane madness of surgical interventions on physically healthy children. My hope is to see an end to psychologists and surgeons subjecting children to experimentation and that those who have been harmed receive similar judgments.

Consider getting the book “Embracing God’s Design,” a remarkable one-of-a-kind resource to educate church leaders and families on the topic of transgenderism, and availing yourself with the accompanying free teaching videos.

Walt Heyer serves as Senior Fellow in the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council.