Lawsuits Are Bringing Down The Transgender Industrial Complex

True societal pathologies have a limited shelf life, and it turns out the most recent pathology – transgender ideology — is no exception. Detransitioner Fox Varian recently won $2 million against the psychologist and surgeon who led her into mutilation, a double mastectomy, at the age of 16. Almost immediately, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association timidly walked back their support of gender-related mutilation of minors. The reckoning has begun.

In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill proposes that “[t]here is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again — now.” The transgender phenomenon — though, in its details, unprecedented in human history — seems to have happened before.

In 1935, Portuguese neurosurgeon Dr. Antonio Egas Moniz created the lobotomy procedure to treat severe mental illness. The first U.S. lobotomy was performed in 1936 by Dr. Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts at George Washington University Hospital. From the mid-1930s until the late 1950s, approximately 40,000-50,000 U.S. patients were lobotomized. The global community of medical experts was so impressed with this treatment that, in 1949, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the man who invented it.

As “perfected” by Dr. Freeman, a lobotomy involved plunging an ice pick through the patient’s eye socket and into his brain. The trail of physical and mental ruination was long and wide.

No one does lobotomies anymore. Repulsion caught up with the experts and ended the horror.

In the 1980s, a different type of mania swept the therapeutic world. This one left not physical scars but a wake of emotional, reputational, and family devastation. The phenomenon was called “repressed memories” or “false memories,” aligning with the American Psychiatric Association’s inclusion of “psychogenic amnesia” in its 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders.

During this time, national alarm about child sex abuse led to media saturation with survivor stories and wildly inflated estimates of the number of child victims. A coterie of psychotherapists sprang up to help patients unearth memories of sexual trauma that were so deeply buried in their psyches that years or even decades could pass with no recollection of harm. Only during intense sessions with these “expert” therapists did patients conclude that maybe dad had done something horrible. The result was a flood of lawsuits against alleged perpetrators that destroyed families and lives.

Repressed-memory claims against supposed sexual abusers peaked between 1992 and 1994 and then suddenly dropped off. Several factors contributed to the abrupt halt. One was the American Psychiatric Association’s acknowledgment of the problematic use of its “psychogenic amnesia” diagnosis in “repressed memory” therapy. It is “not known what proportion of adults who report memories of sexual abuse were actually abused,” the APA warned, and it advised therapists to maintain a neutral stance and avoid techniques that might influence a patient to claim memories that may be false. The APA went further in 1999 and 2000, issuing a position statement urging therapists to focus on a patient’s current difficulties without automatically validating unproven “memories.”

APA developments, though, were perhaps not paramount in the near-disappearance of the phenomenon. Perhaps the primary impetus for the return to sanity occurred when a California dad named Gary Ramona sued his daughter’s therapists for implanting false memories of his abusing her. Ramona lost not only his job but his family because of the accusations, which his daughter had come to believe, via therapy, were genuine. The jury awarded him $500,000 for lost wages and emotional harm.

That verdict came in 1994. Subsequent verdicts in similar cases climbed into the millions. And therapists stopped implanting false memories.

The transgender craze seems to be following a similar path. First came the concept of treating gender dysphoria with radical and even horrifying medical interventions (much as schizophrenia was treated with an icepick in the brain). After the skeptical public, and even doctors, were acclimated to suppress their revulsion with blind support of “expert” opinion, trans practitioners settled in to enjoy the pecuniary and honorific benefits of their new specialty (much as neurosurgeons bought vacation homes while Dr. Munoz cradled his Nobel Prize).

And we’ve now arrived at the Gary Ramona moment.

Victims of lobotomies were unlikely to sue perpetrators in the less litigious mid-20^th century. But by the 1990s, Ramona and others damaged by reckless therapists sought jury awards to halt the demonic nonsense that destroyed their lives. These plaintiffs were the courageous models for Fox Varian and other vulnerable young women (and it’s usually women) who suffered such harm from the professionals they trusted for help.

Especially in the non-legacy media, this verdict has been the shot heard round the world. Plaintiffs in similar cases pending across the country are celebrating the first real sign of hope — hope that they might obtain legal redress for the horrors inflicted on them. Buoyed by the Varian verdict, other damaged souls who haven’t yet filed lawsuits are now telephoning lawyers. Nothing can restore these young people’s broken bodies, but a few more awards will erase the incentives to prey on other troubled children.

Already, some medical-malpractice carriers are excluding coverage for liability related to the euphemistically named “gender affirming” interventions. Insurance companies reviewing the landscape can see nothing but hefty checks written to plaintiffs and their attorneys. Some states, such as Massachusetts and California, have reacted by mandating that insurers cover these claims, but such mandates seem shrouded in a sense of desperation. Most in the trans industry and their political allies are beginning to realize that they don’t have enough fingers to plug the holes in the dike. The end is coming.

Perhaps something like this will continue to happen “over and over again,” as O’Neill posited, but this chapter plumbs the depths of bizarre and shocking medical practice. The human brain is endlessly imaginative, and the Devil never rests, but maybe we’ll get a respite of a few more decades before the cycle begins again. There’s always hope.

Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.