Preventable Tragedies: Why Detransitioners Are Suing Doctors

When parents need to take their child to a doctor over matters like anxiety, depression, or struggles with their body, it’s already a tense and stressful situation. The short walk from the car to the doctor’s office can lead to any number of potential worst-case scenarios popping into a parent’s mind. And that’s to say nothing of the mental well-being of the child in need. Both the parent and the child need honest help and information.

What they don’t need is advice like this: Your daughter is a boy, and if you want to save her life, you’ll refer to her by her preferred name and male pronouns.

This was the “advice” a mental health provider gave Tammy Fournier when she sought help for her daughter’s anxiety, depression, and feelings of discomfort with her body.

Thankfully, Tammy did not treat her daughter as a boy but instead gave her the space, love, and support to work through her anxiety and other struggles. Her daughter grew comfortable with her sex. But many doctors have used similar tactics to pressure parents and their children to pursue harmful transition efforts—efforts that often extend far beyond names and pronouns.

A growing number of people who have fallen victim to some doctors’ misleading statements and guidance about puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for “gender transition” are speaking up about the harm they endured, and some of them are taking their healthcare professionals to court.  

What does it mean to be a detransitioner?

Broadly speaking, detransitioners are individuals who have chosen to stop receiving dangerous transition drugs or pursuing other body-altering procedures that doctors said would resolve their mental health struggles or discomfort with their sex. Detransitioners have typically come to embrace their sex and no longer wish to identify inconsistently with it.

Tragically, some transition procedures are irreversible. When a doctor removes a young woman’s healthy breasts, for example, she will never be able to nurse her children. And prescribing dangerous puberty-blocking drugs can cause irreversible damage on a child’s brain development and even affect a young woman’s ability to later conceive. Healthcare professionals who tell parents and young people that these drugs and procedures are “safe and reversible” are lying.

Doctors who push their patients to undergo these dangerous “gender transition” efforts fail to follow the basic medical dictate to “do no harm.”

The first verdict

In recent years, detransitioners have been telling their stories in courtrooms, in congressional hearings, and in the press. On January 30, 2026, a jury in White Plains, New York, finally gave one of them a verdict.

Fox Varian‘s childhood was marked by instability. A custody battle between her parents began when she was 7. She was later diagnosed with autism, struggled with depression, anxiety, and social phobia, and bounced from school to school. At 15, she began questioning her sex. At 16, doctors removed her healthy breasts—a surgery her own mother opposed but ultimately consented to out of fear that refusing would cost her daughter’s life. That fear, the trial would reveal, had been actively cultivated by Fox’s psychologist.

The regret was nearly instantaneous.

“I immediately had a thought that this was wrong, and it couldn’t be true,” Fox told The Epoch Times. “I felt shame. It’s hard to face that you are disfigured for life.”

She filed suit in 2023 against psychologist Kenneth Einhorn and surgeon Dr. Simon Chin. The trial revealed that Einhorn had written a referral letter recommending the surgery while omitting that Fox had told staff at the Albany Pride Center she “felt pressure” from “family, friends, and culture” and had expressed ongoing doubts. Both providers later acknowledged they would not have proceeded had they known—but they proceeded anyway. Fox’s legal team characterized Einhorn’s approach as “Whatever the kid wants, the kid gets.”

The jury found both providers liable for departing from the standard of care and awarded Fox $1.6 million for pain and suffering and $400,000 for future medical expenses—$2 million total, the first jury verdict of its kind in the country. As independent journalist Benjamin Ryan has documented, at least 28 detransitioner lawsuits are currently filed across the United States. Fox’s was the first to reach a jury. God willing, it will not be the last.

A growing wave of accountability

Fox Varian’s verdict was the first, but the legal pressure on the gender medicine industry extends far beyond one courtroom in White Plains. Across the country, detransitioners are coming forward, and the institutions that harmed them are beginning to face consequences.

• Chloe Cole was placed on puberty blockers and testosterone beginning at age 12, and at 15, surgeons removed her healthy breasts. “They replaced it with permanent damage and stripped me of the final years of my childhood,” she said. She has since become one of the most prominent detransitioner advocates in the United States, testifying before Congress and state legislatures across the country. In May 2026, she addressed Home Depot shareholders directly, calling on the company to end its apparent coverage of transition procedures for minors. Her medical malpractice trial against Kaiser Permanente—the healthcare system she says profited from her confusion—is scheduled for April 5, 2027, the next major courtroom test after Fox.
• Prisha Mosley had her healthy breasts removed at 18 after doctors steered her toward transition without meaningfully addressing years of documented trauma, including sexual assault and diagnoses of OCD and an eating disorder. Today, she lives with chronic pain, a permanently altered voice, and the inability to nurse her children. Her case was dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds in August 2025, but North Carolina subsequently extended the limitations period for such claims to 10 years, and her appeal is currently pending before the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
• Cristina Hineman was struggling with depression, anxiety, and self-harm when she walked into a Planned Parenthood in Hudson, New York, shortly after turning 18. After a 30-minute appointment, a nurse practitioner prescribed her testosterone—and a little over a year later, a surgeon removed her healthy breasts. In April 2024, Campbell Miller Payne filed the first-ever detransitioner lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, naming the nurse practitioner, the surgeon, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America itself. Her case is proceeding in New York state court.
• Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in the United States, agreed in May 2026 to a landmark settlement coordinated between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the U.S. Department of Justice. The hospital paid $10 million to resolve allegations that it submitted false Medicaid billings to secure coverage for dangerous transition procedures, permanently banned five physicians from practicing at the facility, and committed to establishing the country’s first dedicated detransition clinic, required to provide endocrinology, surgery, primary care, fertility counseling, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, free of charge to patients for the first five years.

Many more detransitioner lawsuits could be on the horizon as the science behind these irreversible procedures continues to crumble. The doctors, clinics, and institutions that enabled—and in many cases actively encouraged—these permanent, life-altering decisions are beginning to discover that “we followed the consensus” is not much of a defense.

Especially when that “consensus” is rapidly falling apart.

The truth is winning

Tammy Fournier was told that her daughter was a boy, and that refusing to treat her like one was a death sentence. She didn’t believe it. She and her husband held firm, and their daughter is better for it. But they were the exception—and for every parent who trusted their instincts, thousands of others trusted their doctors instead. They had no reason not to.

Fox Varian’s mother trusted her doctors, too. She consented to an irreversible surgery on her 16-year-old daughter because a psychologist made her believe that saying no meant burying her child. A jury in White Plains looked at that and called it what it was: a departure from every standard medicine is supposed to uphold.

That verdict will not give Fox her breasts back. It will not undo what was done to Prisha, or Cristina, or Chloe. But it will make the next doctor think twice. And the one after that. The lie that was sold to thousands of families—that this was medicine, that it was necessary, that there was no other road—is finally meeting the scrutiny and accountability it always deserved.

What was done to these women, sadly, cannot be undone. But we pray it will be used to protect future generations from the dubious “science” of gender ideology.