Fox Varian, a 22-year-old woman who underwent the surgery as a teen, was awarded $2 million in damages on Jan. 30 by the New York Supreme Court. The six-member jury in Westchester County ruled that $1.6 million of the $2 million was for the past pain she experienced, as well as future suffering, and $400,000 was for future medical expenses, according to multiple news outlets and reporting by Benjamin Ryan of The Free Press.
Varian, who identified as transgender during the time of the surgery, sued the practitioners for malpractice in 2023. Varian’s lawyers argued that her psychologist Kenneth Einhorn was “putting the idea in Fox’s head” that she needed gender transition surgery and failed to take the proper steps in referring her to surgery.
As a teen, Varian lived with depression, anxiety, anorexia, social phobia and body-image issues, and was estranged from her father when she was young after a three-year custody battle between her parents. Varian also was diagnosed with autism.
During sessions with Einhorn, Fox, 15 at the time, began to question whether she was female. In two months, she cut her hair, bound her breasts, and changed her name to Gabriel, then Rowan.
Einhorn referred her to an LGBTQ center in Albany, which Varian visited twice. Varian informed a staff member during her second visit in July 2019 that she “continued to question” her gender identity. Not only did she express that she felt “lost at this time” but she also mentioned she was afraid she “would lose credibility by discussing this with others” and felt “pressure to decide on a male identity versus a female identity by family, peers, and culture.”
Varian received the surgery in December 2019, less than 12 months after she began socially transitioning.
Attorneys argued Einhorn “drove the train” for Fox’s request to have a double mastectomy. Following Fox’s request, Einhorn sent a referral letter for the surgery on her behalf.
The psychologist and the surgeon neglected proper care in his referral, according to the attorneys. Einhorn failed to request notes on Varian’s sessions at the LGBTQ center, which may have included Varian’s expressed doubts on her gender identity. The referral letter contained only three paragraphs, failing to mention that Varian had anorexia and major depression.
The surgeon Simon Chin met with Varian for a total of an hour, split between two appointments during the nine weeks before the surgery. The legal team argued that Einhorn and Chin had also failed to address the potential aftermath of the surgery, including regret, and the possibility that the surgery would not fix psychological issues.
Einhorn admitted that writing the referral letter without including notes about Varian’s expressed doubts about her identity did not follow standards of care, and Chin admitted that he would not have conducted the surgery had he known about Varian’s doubts. Both acknowledged that Varian’s questioning of her gender identity only four months before surgery failed to meet the standard that gender identity should be stable for at least six months before a transition surgery.
Adam Deutsch, Varian’s lawyer, argued that they abandoned all guardrails.
“They had every opportunity to slow this down, to do the work, to follow the standards, to say ‘Not yet,’ to ask questions, to explore,” Deutsch said. “And instead, they did nothing. They abandoned all of the guardrails and then tried to sell to you that no guardrails exist. And a vulnerable child paid the price.”
During the trial, Varian stated, “I was 16. And I was really, really mentally ill, obviously. I obviously wasn’t mature enough to make the decision to have surgery. And I certainly wasn’t mature enough to handle the aftermath.”
Afterward, Varian continued to struggle with depression and mental health issues—the psychologist noted suicidal thoughts and Varian’s mother noticed she had started cutting herself.
“It’s so hard to face that you are disfigured for life,” Varian said at the trial. “No amount of reconstruction is ever going to bring back what I lost.”
The case could set a precedent for other individuals who underwent gender transitions and are seeking legal remedies, and doctors may adopt caution to avoid legal risks with malpractice.
Quena Gonzalez, senior director of Government Affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, spoke on the spiritual battle raging beneath the surface of transgenderism.
“Spiritually, this issue is about both crippling the individuals subjected to these experiments, physically and emotionally, and crippling society epistemologically,” Gonzalez said.
“The bad news is that none of this is new,” Gonzalez said. “But the Good News of the Gospel— ‘gospel’ literally means ‘good news’—is that God has been restoring true identities and shattered lives since the very beginning. Yes, the deceiver bruised the heel of Eve’s offspring, but Jesus has come to crush the deceiver’s head, to destroy deception, and to restore that which has been marred and broken into an unfathomable beautiful trophy of grace.”
