Hadley Freeman writes

Last week Fox Varian, a 22-year-old woman, was awarded $2 million by a New York court in a medical malpractice lawsuit against doctors who gave her a double mastectomy when she was 16 — not because it was medically necessary but because Varian was then identifying as a boy.

Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, did not want her then teenage daughter to lose her breasts. She had seen her autistic daughter through a host of other problems, including anxiety and anorexia. Varian had cycled through name changes — Isabella to Gabriel to Rowan and finally to Fox — as if she were trying to find herself. Then she announced she was transgender. Instead of seeing this as yet another manifestation of Varian’s unhappiness, her psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, insisted it was the other way round: the unhappiness stemmed from her being the wrong gender, and told Deacon that Varian was at risk of “self-harm” if she didn’t have surgery.

Overlooking the fact that lopping off her healthy breasts would itself be harm.

Say what you want about putting vulnerable people on long-term, untested hormones, and subjecting them to unnecessary operations which will likely require lifelong additional surgical interventions, but it’s a great money-spinner. Money for the surgery, money for the follow-up: no wonder the medical establishment went all in on anti-science trans ideology. In 2022, Boston Children’s Hospital proudly posted videos promoting “gender-affirming hysterectomies” and its own doctors claimed “refusing to get a haircut” and “plays with the opposite gender toys” were signs a young child might be transgender.

Are we crazy to expect doctors to have better sense than that? Shouldn’t better sense than that be a core part of the job? The Hippocratic Oath must have a few words about it, no?

I recently heard a journalist on the radio say they found the gender debate “boring”. I can only assume this journalist hasn’t been paying attention, because this “debate” has become a medical, psychological, journalistic, linguistic, employment, safeguarding, educational, legal, social, financial, scientific and penal scandal.

And there’s always the nagging question: how can adults be this credulous and stupid? It’s a question we may get tired of, but it’s not boring.

I have been covering the gender scandal for (sigh) 12 years, but I will never stop being shocked by the number of people willing to trash the most basic safeguards, letting children be mutilated by venal doctors, letting women be put at risk again and again. Gender ideologues insist they can remake the human body on a whim. But, as ever, it is the bodies of women and children that are treated as disposable.

If we stop being shocked we’ve gone over to the other side. Stay shocked.