The Transgender Industrial Complex Is Collapsing

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, one character asks another how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he responds. “Gradually and then suddenly.” That quote has become a famous metaphor for slow, compounding developments that culminate in a sudden collapse – and now it applies to the transgender industrial complex that has for years insidiously preyed on vulnerable and confused children.

A pair of recent developments, which at first may appear distinct but are actually intimately related, reveal how transgender ideology has lost its grip over both the legal and medical establishments – pillars of the left’s institutional control over American society.

First, last week, a jury in White Plains, New York, awarded a 22-year-old woman named Fox Varian $2 million in a lawsuit against two medical providers. If you only get your information from legacy outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, or NBC, you’ve completely missed this story. But it nonetheless represents a dam-breaking moment that promises to unleash a torrent of lawsuits against activist-minded medical professionals who pushed transgender “treatments” on minors based on left-wing ideology rather than science.

Journalist Benjamin Ryan was the only reporter who attended the entire three-week trial, and he published his account in The Free Press. As he details, when Varian was just 16 years old, she received a double mastectomy under the label of “gender-affirming care.”

During the trial, Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, testified that she initially did not want her daughter to undergo the surgery. But Varian’s psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, said that removing her breasts was the only way to “heal” her gender confusion.

Like so many other parents of confused kids, Deacon was made to believe that her daughter was in mortal danger unless she signed off on the surgery. Einhorn and his co-defendant, plastic surgeon Simon Chin, argued that Varian wanted the procedure and that she was at risk of suicide if she did not have the mastectomy. It was “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision, Deacon told the jury.

As whistleblowers from inside the gender transition industry have reported, this sort of emotional blackmail is the go-to strategy for doctors and mental health professionals pushing transgender drugs and surgeries for minors.

A jury agreed with the argument made by Varian’s attorneys that Einhorn and Chin did not properly notify her or her mother about the risks associated with the surgery, and that the healthcare providers violated basic standards of care. Einhorn and Chin notably failed to address Varian’s other physiological conditions, including anorexia, depression, ADHD, autism, and body dysmorphia, before jumping straight to recommending surgery.

Varian’s case is the first instance of a detransitioner bringing a successful medical malpractice lawsuit against her doctors. More than two dozen other such cases are already pending in court, and Varian’s ruling provides an important precedent.

Then, this week, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons published new guidance officially recommending that its members not perform transgender surgeries on patients until they reach age 19. Shortly thereafter, the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest professional medical association in the U.S., said in a statement to National Review that “the evidence for gender-affirming surgical intervention in minors is insufficient for us to make a definitive statement… the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

Once again, you likely won’t see this story covered by most corporate newsrooms. But with that one statement, the AMA just kicked out the foundation underneath the entire gender industrial complex, and it is only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Just five years ago, the AMA was pushing the exact opposite narrative. In an April 2021 press release, the AMA explicitly opposed “state legislation that would prohibit medically necessary gender transition-related care for minor patients.” The press release further implied that not allowing child gender surgeries would lead to a catastrophic increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide among gender-confused kids. In 2023, the AMA further called transgender drugs and surgeries for minors “medically necessary,” citing biased and shoddy studies commissioned by LGBTQ+ activist groups as “evidence.”

Until just a few days ago, virtually every other major medical organization was aligned with this stance. Healthcare providers then used this guidance as justification to push cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries on kids. Doctors told parents like Claire Deacon that “the experts” recommended double mastectomies for teenage girls and chemical castration drugs for young boys. “See,” they would say, “the AMA says that this is OK.”

So, what changed for the AMA and ASPS? The unstated answer is the verdict in New York. If there’s one thing that institutional organizations like the AMA are scared of more than being targeted by the woke mob, it’s lawsuits that will cost their members big money. Now that doctors have to worry about being sued for chopping body parts off healthy children and prescribing them drugs that will disfigure them for life, the “evidence” that we were all told supported child gender transitions has suddenly gone missing.

But while the AMA and ASPS are scrambling to protect their pocketbooks, what they don’t realize is that they’ve exposed that “gender-affirming care” was built on a pack of lies all along. No new “evidence” has emerged in the past week that would justify such an astonishing 180 – going from insisting that child gender surgeries are medically necessary to recommending that doctors wait until a patient is 19 before putting them under the knife.

In other words, the medical establishment is admitting that promoting transgender surgeries for minors was about politics all along and had nothing to do with “the science.” The “evidence” was always bogus, and these groups that are supposed to uphold “do no harm” as their highest principle discarded it as soon as it seemed culturally advantageous to do so.

The collapse of the transgender industrial complex is undoubtedly a major, historic victory – for detransitioners, for parents, for future generations of kids, and for basic common sense. It is perhaps most of all a victory for those who struggled through years of cancellation, deplatforming, and personal sacrifice to stand up for the truth and expose the lies of transgender ideology. Just a few years ago, saying what the AMA is now acknowledging was enough to get your account banned on Twitter and a meeting with your HR office at work. Now the tables have turned.

But we also cannot forget the tragic, irreparable harm that was done to untold numbers of children and families. Those who enabled and encouraged this harm shouldn’t be allowed to memory-hole their complicity or escape accountability. The battle is won, but the war is far from over.

Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.