On Jan. 30, a New York State jury awarded a 22-year-old woman, Fox Varian, $2 million in damages for her 2019 “gender-affirming” double mastectomy, which she came to deeply regret. She was 16 years old at the time.
This settlement against Varian’s psychologist and plastic surgeon is the first legal judgment imposed upon those performing such mutilations. In court testimony, Varian explained that following the removal of her healthy breasts, “I immediately had a thought that this was wrong, and it couldn’t be true,” adding, “Shame, I felt shame. It’s hard to face that you are disfigured for life.”
The Epoch Times reported that Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, was worried “her daughter would commit suicide if she didn’t get” the procedure and told the court that her daughter’s psychologist certainly “increased that worry.” This represents the deeply deceptive, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?” emotional blackmail.
This judgment has sent shockwaves through the medical and psychological community peddling this lie. They know more are coming. Independent reporter Benjamin Ryan has documented 27 other detransitioner lawsuits filed to date. And Manhattan Institute research from 2017 to 2023 found that a conservative minimum of 5,200 U.S. teen girls had their breasts removed, believing it would solve their transgender confusion.
This industry’s mounting fears were demonstrated days later on Feb. 3, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) issued a new “Position Statement on Gender Surgery for Children and Adolescents,” which concluded, “[T]here is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.” This is because “systematic reviews and evidence reassessment have subsequently identified limitations in study quality, consistency, and follow-up alongside emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms.” Of course, the U.K.’s systematic Cass Review arrived at this fact in April 2024.
Thus, this new position statement proclaimed, in bold, “ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.”
No one should downplay the profound significance of this confession. Certainly, ASPS’s nine-page statement was in the works before this $2 million New York judgment. It fully knew which way the wind was blowing, and the ASPS is not alone.
On that very same day, Feb. 3, a spokesman for the American Medical Association (AMA) told The Washington Post that “the evidence for gender-affirming surgical intervention in minors is insufficient for us to make a definitive statement” in support of such procedures. The Post reported the AMA “agrees with ASPS that surgeries for minors should be generally deferred to adulthood in the absence of clear evidence.”
We are expected to believe these ideological and experimental transgender medical interventions will become wonderfully efficacious the day a minor comes of age. Of course, they will not. These new policy positions are all about liability protection and legal consent.
But here’s what is true. Feb. 3, 2026, can now be marked as the day major American medical associations admitted the “settled science” of wrongly named gender-affirming care has been a house of cards.
Richard Levine, President Biden’s loud and proud assistant secretary of health — who transformed into “Rachel” at the ripe age of 54, ending his decades-long marriage to his wife and his fatherhood of two children — famously peddled the settled-science lie. He regularly claimed experimentally giving off-label drugs to children and cutting off their perfectly healthy body parts was “evidence-based” and “literally saves lives.”
He authoritatively declared on National Public Radio in 2022:
There is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.
It was not that long ago that the AMA, which now admits the research is “insufficient,” barked at citizens in an official national press statement to, “Stop interfering in health care of transgender children.”
Of course, there are no “transgender” children … or adults. The American Psychiatric Association has readily admitted that “transgender” is not a medical or psychiatric diagnosis. It does not exist in nature. It is an ideological construct. Oh, that fickle “settled science!”
Note also that the “Trans them or they will die!” fabrication parroted by medical, psychological, educational, and social work professionals also died with the ASPS and AMA admissions. They are all too aware of what happened in December 2024 when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asked American Civil Liberties Union attorney and trans champion Chase Strangio, in United States v. Skrmetti oral arguments, to respond to the fact that “on page 195 of the Cass report, it says: ‘There is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide.’” She was forced to admit this fact before the court.
The trans lie is imploding under the pressure of reality. Male and female are biological facts and unspeakably beautiful human truths. They are not “performative acts,” as the highly influential gender theorist Judith Butler first declared in Theatre Journal in late 1988.
There, Butler infamously catapulted this whole sex-denying revolution, writing, “In order to describe the gendered body, a phenomenological theory of constitution requires an expansion of the conventional view of acts to mean both that which constitutes meaning and that through which meaning is performed or enacted.” She followed that tortured convolution with this plainer language: “In other words, the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts.”
There is no gender studies class at any university that does not pay homage to Butler’s foundational influence. Her words famously became manifest in what launched this season of madness: Bruce Jenner appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine as “Caitlyn” in the summer of 2015. We were all expected to dutifully believe he simply became the woman he always was. (Few appreciate this took place just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court de-sexed marriage and the family in its landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision.) Butler’s theatrical concept of male and female also presaged male Dylan Mulvaney’s long, boorish cosplay that started as “Day 1 of being a girl” in 2022.
Yes, the ASPS and AMA are the first culpable professional medical societies to admit that America is no longer hostage to this fabrication. Feb. 3, 2026, now marks the beginning of the end of the trans delusion. This fact is well worth celebrating and remembering.
