On his Substack, Andrew Doyle celebrates the recent court victory of a young woman who sued her surgeon and the psychologist who recommended her for surgery:
It is curious that one of the proven cures for human hysteria is the threat of legal action. During the Salem witch trials of 1692, the supposedly “tormented” girls who had accused villagers of cavorting with the devil “cried out” against a gentleman from the nearby town of Andover. He promptly issued a writ for defamation, and the girls swiftly retracted their claim. It turns out that the forces of God will back down from Satan when faced with the prospect of a lawsuit.
This week, a jury in New York has awarded $2 million in damages to a detransitioner called Fox Varian. Now twenty-two years old, Varian had previously struggled with her gender identity and was subjected to a double mastectomy at the age of sixteen. Both the surgeon and the psychologist were found culpable for not following the standards of care or communicating adequately with each other during the consultation period.
Varian no longer identifies as transgender, but the damage has been done. During the trial, she said she regretted the surgery almost instantly. “I immediately had a thought that this was wrong”, she said, “and it couldn’t be true”. After surgery, she recalled the pain in her chest as being akin to “searing hot … ripping sensations” and that she felt “shame” at the fact that she was now “disfigured for life”.
It goes without saying that no medical professional should be complicit in the mutilation of a child who is so clearly in need of psychotherapeutic support. According to research by the Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023 around 6,000 girls under the age of eighteen had undergone double mastectomies. Worse still, at least fifty of these children were under twelve-and-a-half years old. Activists have routinely claimed that no minors are being subjected to “gender-affirming” surgery. This is a lie.
What now for the many thousands of detransitioners who have grown up to regret their treatment? Even puberty blockers have been linked with testicular atrophy, increased risk of cancer, osteoporosis and impaired brain development. It is shocking enough that all of this was encouraged by those in a position of authority and trust, but we should never forget that it was in the service of a pseudo-religious belief in a gendered soul.
This was hysteria, plain and simple, and not even the brightest minds were immune from falling under its spell. No reputable study has found that “gender-affirming medicine” is beneficial to patients, and yet the medical establishment kowtowed to activist pressure. It is reminiscent of the judges and ministers of Salem, going along with nonsense out of fear that they too might be accused of witchcraft.
Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
[…] LIKE A BUCKET OF COLD WATER: Lawyers versus the genderwoke establishment. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » LIKE A BUCKET OF COLD WATER: Lawyers versus the genderwoke establishment. — February 4, 2026 @ 03:00
for every 10,000 men that commit suicide after castrating themselves, 1 woman detransitions
this species is retarded and doomed
Comment by patriarchalape — February 4, 2026 @ 07:05
Males have always been expendable. There’s nothing new there. We’ve evolved so that is a species-wide default.
Comment by Nicholas — February 4, 2026 @ 09:59
It is also reminiscent of the purported child sex abuse–utilizing recovered memories–that occurred at day care facilities in the 1980s. Bill Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno obtained notoriety for prosecuting several cases, yet was never directly questioned during her Senate confirmation hearings.
Reno pioneered the “Miami Method,” a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and inspired passage of a law allowing them to testify by closed-circuit television, out of the possibly intimidating presence of their suspected molesters. Bobby Fijnje, “a 14-year-old boy, was acquitted after his attorneys discredited the alleged victims’ persistent interrogations by a psychologist who called herself the yucky secrets doctor. Grant Snowden was acquitted, retried, convicted, and eventually freed by a federal appeals court after 12 years in prison.
Wikipedia list dozens of these cases of falsely accused, convicted, and eventually freed due to hysteria and moral panic.
Comment by Forbes — February 4, 2026 @ 10:09