A young woman who had her breasts cut off by doctors while a teenager to live as a boy has won $2million in compensation for her suffering.
The landmark New York court decision is expected to spark potentially thousands of similar lawsuits in Britain and the US – countries that have enthusiastically embraced transgender ideology.
Campaigners believe the case brought by Fox Varian, now 22, will hail the end of a ‘massive medical and social experiment’ on youngsters who believe they were born in the wrong body.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, whose son Xavier transitioned to become Vivian Jenna in 2022, claims he was ‘tricked’ by doctors and told his child would take his own life if he refused to consent to cross-sex hormone treatment. This is normally a precursor to trans surgery.
After the Fox Varian ruling, Mr Musk said yesterday: ‘There will be thousands more court cases of children who were mutilated by evil doctors. The schools, psychologists, psychiatrists, and state officials who facilitated this will pay dearly, too.’
Many young people in Britain, some only 18 or 19, have undergone irreversible operations by NHS and private surgeons to have their breasts removed and, frequently, their entire genitalia restructured to mimic the opposite sex.
In the US, 28 compensation cases like Ms Varian’s own are in the pipeline as US President Donald Trump acts to restrict transgender surgery on children and teenagers.
During the hearing, her lawyers accused doctors of pushing a double mastectomy on her when she was just 16.
The life-altering surgery was approved by a psychologist and a surgeon, both of whom the jury found liable for medical malpractice.
The court was told that Ms Varian underwent the so-called ‘top surgery’ to remove her breasts, which was ‘wrongly presented’ by her medics as a solution to her gender dysphoria, or fear of living as a female.
The jury ruled the two doctors had ignored standards of care and proper safeguards in order to pressure Ms Varian into surgery which was irreversible.
Ms Varian’s lawyers said the psychologist had ‘put the idea of transgender surgery into her head’ and ‘drove the train’.
She will now receive a payout the equivalent of £1.5million.
Her mother, Claire Deacon, testified that she only consented when she was told her daughter might take her own life if not operated on. ‘This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,’ said Claire in an interview after the court hearing.
She suggested that the suicide warning was a ‘scare tactic’, adding: ‘I think he [the psychologist] believed what he was saying, but he was very, very wrong.’
The surgery left Ms Varian feeling physically ill and deeply unhappy, court papers revealed at the weekend. They claimed that the doctors should have checked if their patient had any psychological problems, such as ADHD, autism, or body dysmorphia, before carrying out the surgery.
Meanwhile, the doctors’ legal team unsuccessfully argued that she lived happily as a male for several years before filing for compensation four years after the 2019 surgery.
They claimed Ms Varian first came to them using male pronouns, verbally said she was a ‘trans male’, and that chest surgery was suggested by her rather than the medical team.
Ms Varian is among growing numbers of patients who claim their lives have been ruined by radical transgender surgery.
The first British patient to speak out, to the Daily Mail, was Ritchie Herron, a 35-year-old de-transitioner who had his genitals removed during NHS surgery which, he claimed, left him infertile, incontinent and living ‘like a sexual eunuch’. He now has no feeling in his genital area.
‘It is as if I have been castrated,’ he added.
And he complained that an unnamed NHS trust failed to warn him of the consequences of the drastic surgery, which was the ‘biggest mistake of [his] life’.
In England, NHS funding for adult and children’s gender dysphoria services, including puberty blockers and surgery, increased to £78million, annually in 2024.
Last year it was announced that a UK trial looking into the impact of puberty blockers on children as young as ten is to take place. It follows the 2024 Cass Review of NHS gender identity services for children and young people which concluded that the quality of studies claiming puberty blockers have beneficial effects was ‘poor’.
