Why this case is likely the first in a wave of litigation over irreversible medical procedures on minors.

“Here come the gender-detransitioner lawsuits,” predicted The Hill’s Merrill Matthews on October 31, 2023.

“Nearly half of the states have passed legislation restricting or banning what’s referred to as “gender-affirming care” for minors,” began Matthews. “Most of those laws have been challenged in court, with some judges upholding the bans, while others have blocked them.”

“Regardless of where the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, may end up, the real check on gender-affirming care for minors may come from the multimillion-dollar lawsuits now being filed against the physicians and health care centers that provide the care,” warned Matthews.

“It’s way too early to tell whether the growing number of detransitioner lawsuits will succeed, but I suspect many of them will,” mused Matthews. “Juries are likely to be very sympathetic to the claims of minors, who clearly needed mental health care but received life-altering medication or surgeries instead.”

The prediction was prescient.

Dozens of medical-malpractice and related claims have been filed in various states against providers involved in gender-affirming care, with cases pending in jurisdictions including California, Wisconsin, and others where plaintiffs allege improper evaluation, consent or harm from irreversible treatments that began in youth. 

Legal groups and law-firms focused on detransitioner litigation report filing more than a dozen such lawsuits nationwide. 

At the same time, policymakers in some states are responding to perceived legal hurdles in these cases. In North Carolina, for example, legislators passed a bill extending the statute of limitations for medical-malpractice claims related to gender-transition care so that individuals can sue within a longer period after discovering injury, rather than under the usual short window.

The lawsuits are working their way through the justice system, some gaining more legal traction than others. One such case, however, was decided last week in a landmark verdict that is yet to fully hit the mainstream news cycle.

Editors at progressive-leaning outlets are probably still trying to figure out a way to spin, obfuscate, or otherwise dismiss the significance of this lawsuit. Newsflash: There isn’t one. 

Irreversible, life-altering surgeries performed on minors were always going to encounter major legal hurdles eventually.

Last week, the Westchester County Supreme Court awarded a young woman who later detransitioned $2 million in a medical-malpractice lawsuit against the doctors who approved and performed a double mastectomy on her as a minor.

The surgery occurred in 2019, when she was 16 years old. At trial, the jury was asked a narrow and legally specific question — not whether gender dysphoria is real, and not whether adults should be free to make irreversible medical decisions — but whether these physicians met accepted standards of care when recommending permanent surgery for a teenager.

The jury concluded they did not. Testimony centered on the speed of the evaluation process, gaps in psychological assessment, and whether meaningful informed consent was possible given the patient’s age and documented mental-health history. 

This was not a political ruling or a legislative ban issued from the bench. It was a malpractice verdict: a jury affirming that medical authority carries responsibility, and that irreversible interventions — especially when minors are involved — demand rigor, caution, and accountability.

It is also worth noting where this verdict came from. Westchester County is not a conservative outlier or a Republican stronghold; it is a heavily Democratic suburban county where Democratic candidates routinely win countywide races by wide margins. 

In other words, this was not a jury predisposed to skepticism about gender medicine or cultural progressivism. If a malpractice claim like this can prevail before a jury in Westchester, it is reasonable to expect that similar cases may fare even worse for defendants in red states or more conservative jurisdictions — especially as jurors grapple with questions of informed consent, irreversible harm, and the treatment of minors. This case may prove to be less an anomaly than an early warning.

For years, the most powerful justification offered for these interventions was not merely that they might help, but that they were necessary — that denying medical transition to distressed minors would place them at grave risk of suicide. 

That premise is now badly weakened. Recent systematic reviews and policy reversals by European health authorities reflect a growing consensus that the evidence does not establish lower suicide rates for minors who receive puberty blockers, hormones, or surgeries compared with those who do not. 

Distress in these children is real; what is increasingly in doubt is whether irreversible medicalization meaningfully alleviates it. Once the suicide-prevention claim collapses, so does the ethical and legal rationale for extreme interventions. 

Without clear, demonstrable benefit proportional to lifelong harm, the procedures no longer resemble necessary care — they resemble high-risk experimentation conducted under a veil of moral urgency. That shift, more than any cultural backlash, explains why courts, regulators, and juries are now stepping in.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)