When evaluating

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8 responses to “When evaluating”

1. 

   Jan 31, 2026 11:52 AM

   Mo

   About three years there were reports that detransitioners were taking

   Lawsuits against their doctors:

   https://www.broadview.news/p/eleven-lawsuits-by-detransitioners?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=73620&post_id=139510945&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=7y1gi&utm_medium=email

   Looks like this Fox Varian verdict will be the first of several.
2. 

   Jan 31, 2026 11:53 AM

   Mostly Cloudy

   Predicted a few years ago by Lisa Selin Davis.
3. 

   Jan 31, 2026 11:54 AM

   Mostly Cloudy

   Link:

   https://www.broadview.news/p/eleven-lawsuits-by-detransitioners
4. 

   Jan 31, 2026 12:44 PM

   bascule

   Is this appeal-able? Is that likely? I hope it’s just the start of a flood of such wins.
5. 

   Jan 31, 2026 5:31 PM

   Mostly Cloudy

   (Sorry for the multiple posts. I’m posting from my smartphone).
6. 

   Jan 31, 2026 6:29 PM

   Artymorty

   I hope the circumstances of this particular case are not unique — that the patient’s particulars are universal enough across most detransitioners that many, many others can sue and win in court on the strength of this precedent.

   But things like this make me worry:

   The case did not challenge the general propriety of such “care” of minors with gender dysphoria, but alleged it was not appropriate in Fox’s particular case.

   That’s presumably referring to the transgender “standards of care”, as laid out by various activist groups roleplaying as serious medical authorities, like WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (formerly known as, if I recall correctly, ACCPTBDIATPTBW, or A Couple Crossdressers Pretending To Be Doctors In Addition To Pretending To Be Women). The transgender “standards of care” were made-up nonsense to begin with! Who gives a shit if they were or weren’t appropriately followed. What we should give a shit about is whether the universal standards of care and the universal standards of reason were applied — the Hippocratic Oath, and the universal principles of human rights.

   Alas, this is how law often works. It anchors itself to any “recognized” authority or any “formal” standard it can point to, and then measures individual cases against that benchmark. Instead of confronting first principles directly, it prefers to import them second-hand. Philosophical, ethical, and epistemological questions — what is true, what is right, what is justified — get pushed outward and delegated to whoever can successfully present themselves as an authority. The legal process then limits itself to checking whether a case conforms to those borrowed standards, rather than asking whether the standards themselves deserve to exist.

   In the case of “gender-affirming care,” activists understood this structural weakness in the legal system and reverse-engineered their authority around it: they crafted an ersatz “standard of care” tailored to the system’s demand for a benchmark, with the express objective of acquiring legal force through recognition alone. Once installed, it became the yardstick courts and medical and standards-setting authorities have used, because the system would rather compare conduct to an accepted rulebook than examine whether the rulebook is grounded in reality.

   The deeper problem is the circularity this creates. Courts borrow their standards from outside authorities rather than grounding them in first principles — but once a court rules on the basis of those borrowed standards, society then turns around and treats the ruling itself as authoritative. The prestige of the legal system retroactively blesses whatever framework it deferred to in the first place. A standard that entered the courtroom on borrowed credibility leaves with institutional credibility stamped on it.

   That is a laundering mechanism. Weak or partisan frameworks can pass through the legal system and emerge wearing the costume of settled legitimacy. The public hears “the court upheld it” and assumes the underlying principles were tested, when in fact only procedural conformity was tested.

   At that point, one of two things must be true. Either society is wrong to treat legal judgments as morally or epistemically authoritative — since the system explicitly declines to ground its decisions in first principles — or the legal system is failing in its duty by accepting that authority while refusing to do the philosophical and factual homework that would justify it.

   Authority is being claimed somewhere without the corresponding burden being carried anywhere.

   As is always the case with transgender anything, everyone assumes someone else already did the homework, because too few people are willing and able to do it themselves. It’s a prejudice of a certain kind — a squeamishness, and a studied avoidance, dare I say a phobia, of the t word. Surely there’s a term for that kind of prejudice…
7. 

   Jan 31, 2026 9:49 PM

   Your Name’s not Bruce?

   The jury found that in many respects the surgeon and psychologist had skipped important steps when evaluating whether she should go forward with the surgery and had not adequately communicated with each other.

   I wonder if at any time the surgeon or psychologist warned the patient that these procedures would not turn her into a male? Or if either of them ever told her that they would?
8. 

   Jan 31, 2026 10:01 PM

   Artymorty

   My UK friend who had a vaginoplasty said that the fine print he was made to sign before the actual surgery did indeed indicate that he wasn’t being bestowed with an actual real vagina and that his sex wasn’t actually literally being changed.

   But (a) that was in the UK and who knows if that’s the case in the US. And (b) I sincerely doubt these doctors emphasize it to their patients.

   In fact, given the US’s litigious ways, I suspect that putting such truths in writing, even under the pretext of supposedly indemnifying themselves *agaist* legal liability, wouldn’t work, because any actual lawsuit would put a surgeon on a witness stand, stating outright that he or she had known all along that he or she wasn’t changing anyone’s actual sex, and that he or she had expected every single patient to understand that.

   Well, that obviously won’t fly, will it.

   One of the many inherent contradictions in trans medicine insanity…