Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Dec 29, 2024 12 tweets 20 min read Read on X
ACLU Deputy With $543,500 Salary Issues Many False Or Misleading Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine

🧵⬇️I report: The 4th highest paid staffer, AJ Hikes was the ACLU's 1st DEI chief and is at the center of an NLRB case against the ACLU that found it illegally fired an employee on claims she used racist language.Image
LINK: ACLU Deputy With $543,500 Salary Issues Many False Or Misleading Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
The 4th highest paid staffer at over $500,000 per year, AJ Hikes was the ACLU's 1st DEI chief and is at the center of an NLRB case against the ACLU that found it illegally fired an employee on claims she used racist language.Image
The ACLU’s fourth highest paid staffer, who is at the center of a National Labor Relations Board case against the legal nonprofit that it lost in August, made a series of false or misleading claims about pediatric gender medicine in a recent interview.

@AJ_Hikes, who identifies as nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns and describes themselves in their ACLU bio as “a social justice advocate, community organizer, TED Talk Speaker, and unapologetically queer and Black,” holds a powerful position at the liberal legal juggernaut as the deputy executive director for strategy and culture.
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…Image
According to the @ACLU’s 990 tax form, AJ Hikes, who does not have a law degree, earned a salary in 2023 of $543,532, plus $30,884 in “other compensation.” This represented a 50 percent jump compared with their $363,055 salary in 2022, when they were the 11th highest paid staffer. In 2021, when they served as the ACLU’s first chief DEI officer, their salary was $313,806. In 2020, this figure was $264,274.
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…Image
In the Dec. 23 edition of the Bad Queers podcast, entitled “F*ck ‘Em (w/ AJ Hikes),” Hikes spoke at length about the case, U.S. v Skrmetti, that on Dec. 4 received oral arguments at the Supreme Court concerning Tennessee’s ban of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors. Among the numerous false or misleading claims that the ACLU deputy made during the interview were the suggestions that such treatment is only given to minors in their mid-to-late teens and that cisgender (non-transgender) boys can simply go to the doctor and request testosterone to make their voice deeper.
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
In fact, gender-transition treatment can be given to children with gender dysphoria as young as eight years old. And testosterone is a controlled substance; boys cannot legally obtain the hormone for mere cosmetic reasons. They would need to have a diagnosis of a medical condition, such as an endocrine disorder, to obtain a prescription.Image
The @ACLU's @AJ_Hikes is a central player in an unfair-labor-practice case that the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, brought against the ACLU and that went to trial earlier this year. The case concerned Kate Oh, a Korean-American lawyer who was fired from her position as senior policy counsel at the legal nonprofit in 2022. She accused by the ACLU of using “racist stereotypes” to characterize her Black bosses in her internal complaints about them.
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…Image
The NLRB charged that the @ACLU retaliated against Kate Oh’s complaints when it fired her. In August, a judge ruled against the ACLU in the case, finding that the organization had illegally terminated Oh. The ACLU is appealing the decision to the full NLRB. benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…Image
AJ Hikes, who according to their LinkedIn page has a master of social work degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a received a B.A. in English from the University of Delaware in 2006, joined the @ACLU in 2019 as, according to their bio, its first chief equity and inclusion, or DEI, officer. Their bio emphasizes how powerful a position they hold at the ALCU, stating that Hikes “serves as chief counselor and principal partner to the executive director overseeing the critical functions of organization strategic planning and programmatic priority setting.”
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
Prior to joining the legal nonprofit, @AJ_Hikes, who previously went by the name Amber, was executive director of Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs. (Some people consider it offensive to cite the previous name of a transgender or nonbinary person, calling the practice ‘dead naming’. I am specifying the name Amber here for clarity, given the name comes up in references I make below.) In that position, Hikes made a mark by adding black and brown stripes to the rainbow LGBTQ Pride flag.Image
AJ Hikes’ elevation to their current title at the @ACLU in Nov. 2022 and massive pay raise occurred in the wake of the departure of Ronald Newman, who had been the director of the ACLU’s national political advocacy department since 2019.

As Molly Redden @MTRedden reported for @HuffPost in Feb. 2022:
huffpost.com/entry/aclu-exe…
"Newman was the subject of sustained complaints about his treatment of staff, including claims of bullying and misogyny and accusations that his fixation on short-term wins was thwarting the ACLU’s ability to push for more meaningful and lasting policy changes. In Newman’s nearly three years as director, his department of roughly 100 people shed dozens of employees, many of them women of color."
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…Image
When AJ Hikes joined the @ACLU in 2019, their bio characterized them as “an unapologetic queer black woman.” By 2022, when they announced their promotion to their current position at the organization, they characterized themself as nonbinary. Hikes publicly announced their name was now AJ in an Instagram post on March 31, 2024.
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
Hikes’ Instagram post about their new name came nine days after The New York Times ran its first article about Oh’s lawsuit, in which Hikes was referred to as April Hikes and with she/her pronouns and the “Ms.” honorific. The earliest archived version of Hikes’ ACLU bio under the name AJ is dated April 5.
instagram.com/p/C5L7MBrL4Km/…
References to Hikes in the March 22 Times article included:
nytimes.com/2024/03/22/us/…
Soon after, Ms. Oh heard from the A.C.L.U. manager overseeing its equity and inclusion efforts, Amber Hikes, who cautioned Ms. Oh about her language. Ms. Oh’s comment was “dangerous and damaging,” Ms. Hikes warned, because she seemed to suggest the former supervisor physically assaulted her.“Please consider the very real impact of that kind of violent language in the workplace,” Ms. Hikes wrote in an email
.…
The following month, Ms. Hikes, the head of equity and inclusion, wrote to Ms. Oh, documenting a third incident — her own.“Calling my check-in ‘chastising’ or ‘reprimanding’ feels like a willful mischaracterization in order to continue the stream of anti-Black rhetoric you’ve been using throughout the organization,” Ms. Hikes wrote in an email.“I’m hopeful you’ll consider the lived experiences and feelings of those you work with,” she added. (Citing the ongoing case, the A.C.L.U. said Ms. Hikes was unable to comment for this article.)Image
The many false and misleading claims that AJ Hikes, top @ACLU deputy making over a half million dollars annually, said about pediatric gender medicine in a recent interview:

During the recent 75-minute Bad Queers podcast, Hikes gave a wide-ranging interview, speaking about coming out as nonbinary, the double mastectomy they underwent, the upcoming second iteration of the Trump administration, and U.S. v Skrmetti.
youtube.com/watch?v=CxePK2…
The conversation about the Skrmetti case regarding Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment starts at the 28:00 mark. During that discussion, at the 32:31 mark, the podcast’s YouTube page indicates this is where Hikes is “[e]xplaining gender-affirming care to transphobes.”
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
youtube.com/watch?v=CxePK2…

Hikes made a series of false and misleading claims about pediatric gender medicine, which I have indicated in bold below.

Hikes:

▶️Asserted that Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment concerned “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year olds, young people. We’re not talking about eight year olds, nine year olds.”

In fact, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or @WPATH, places no minimum age on who can receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria. Children are eligible to receive puberty blockers as soon as they hit the first stage of puberty, known as Tanner Stage 2. This typically occurs between age 8 and 13 for natal girls and age 9 and 14 for natal boys, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…
my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/pu…
As I reported regarding the recently filed detransitioner lawsuit against leading pediatric gender medicine doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy, in 2017, she sought and received approval for for her NIH-funded research to reduce the minimum age for prescribing cross-sex hormones to children from 13 to 8 years old. The plaintiff in the case against her, Clementine Breen, received puberty blockers from her at age 12, cross-sex hormones at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14. While the Tennessee case before the Supreme Court does not concern gender-transition surgeries, it’s worth noting that @LeorSapir of the @ManhattanInst found evidence that between 2017 and 2023, 50 to 179 girls who were 12.5 years old or younger underwent a double mastectomy as part of a gender transition.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31290407/
benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…
city-journal.org/article/a-cons…
▶️Used the term “medically necessary” regarding pediatric gender-transition treatment.

As subpoenaed documents from Alabama’s lawsuit regarding that state’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment indicated, WPATH included this term in its trans-care guidelines for adolescents despite the authors’ awareness that the available science did not clearly back that such treatment is indeed “medically necessary” for gender dysphoric minors. Those documents also showed that WPATH coordinated with the ACLU itself when drafting these guidelines, with an eye towards employing wording that would help them in the very type of litigation that the ACLU is currently waging against state bans on such medical interventions.
supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/2…
tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…
▶️Claimed that non-transgender boys can access testosterone simply because they want their voices to be deeper or in the event that such a boy “wants to grow facial hair and wants to have these typical male characteristics come on faster.”

This falsely suggests that minor males are able to make essentially cosmetic requests of doctors that would warrant a testosterone prescription. Testosterone is a controlled substance. No child could legally receive the drug in this context. To obtain such a prescription, a boy would need a medical diagnosis, such as delayed puberty. A trans male (natal female) would need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to receive testosterone.

▶️Asserted that cisgender people are the primary recipients of gender-affirmative care.

This claim is indeed factual if one considers that any treatment or modification that men or women make to their bodies that helps emphasize their gender—such as hair transplants for men and breast implants for women—is gender-affirming care, per se.

That said, breast implants obtained for purely cosmetic purposes by cisgender women—which Hikes made reference to in the podcast—are not covered by insurance, as they may be when trans women undergo such an operation. No one is calling a teenage girl’s desire to go from a B cup to a D cup to catch the eyes of boys a “medical necessity.”

And regarding gynecomastia surgeries in particular, Harvard recently misled the public about how common such operations are compared with so-called “top surgery” among natal females who identify as trans males or nonbinary. I covered this previously: benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…

▶️Said that a so-called Brazilian butt lift, or “BBL”, is gender-affirming care for non-trans people.

Doctors strongly advise against minors receiving such a surgery, which has the highest mortality rate of any cosmetic surgery.

Because both men and women obtain such operations to improve their sex appeal, it is not necessarily a female- or male-specific cosmetic operation.
niptuckaesthetics.com/what-age-can-y….
nytimes.com/2021/08/19/sty…
▶️Said that erectile dysfunction drugs are gender-affirming care for non-trans people.

The @MayoClinic says of Viagra (sildenafil): “Sildenafil should never be used in children for erectile dysfunction.”
mayoclinic.org/drugs-suppleme…
▶️Furthered the claim that puberty blockers provide young people a time to think about whether they want to continue onto cross-sex hormones.

According to multiple sources, almost all children who start puberty blockers for gender dysphoria continue onto cross-sex hormones. As British investigative journalist Hannah Barnes @HannahSBee reported in her book Time to Think, this fact strongly suggests that children are not using that time for reflection about whether they wish to take the second drug. Rather, they apparently see their time on blockers as a mere way station before they get what they want: hormones.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ap…
amazon.com/Time-Think-Col…
▶️Said that blockers do not cause sterility.

Given that puberty blocker use is overwhelmingly part and parcel of cross-sex hormone use among minors with gender dysphoria, starting on blockers does indeed typically begin a process that, in particular for natal males who begin them early in their puberty, poses a substantial risk of infertility.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36806443/
▶️Claimed that puberty blockers “have saved young people’s lives.” And said: “Young people are literally dying because they can’t access this care.”

Only one study has ever directly assessed whether gender-transition treatment is associated with an independent, statistically significant difference in the suicide death rate among young people. Conducted in Finland and published in February, the study found no such difference in the death rate.
mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e…
nypost.com/2024/02/24/opi…
Top ACLU litigator Chase Strangio admitted that gender-transition treatment for minors has not been shown to save lives when he told the Supreme Court justices earlier this month:
city-journal.org/article/aclu-a…
MR. STRANGIO: "What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide. And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them. However, there are multiple studies, long-term longitudinal studies that do show that there is a reduction in—in suicidality."

▶️Claimed that puberty blockers are highly effective at treating mental health problems.

A 2024 systematic literature review of puberty blockers as treatment for gender dysphoria, conducted by the University of York, found: “No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development.”
adc.bmj.com/content/109/Su…
Multiple cohort studies, including one conducted by researchers at Britain’s National Health Service that sought to replicate the success of the original study out of the Netherlands that kickstarted the global pediatric gender medicine field, have found that the drugs have no impact on mental health metrics.
nytimes.com/2024/10/23/sci…
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC78…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20646177/
▶️Claimed that blockers are “reversible.”

University College London neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale’s recent review paper on the potential neuropsychiatric impacts of puberty blockers concluded: “Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers. The impact of puberal suppression on measures of neuropsychological function is an urgent research priority.”
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38334046/
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…Image
I presume this here post about me by someone by the name of @awkward_duck is in reference to my reporting about the @ACLU's AJ Hikes's over half million dollar salary and false claims about pediatric gender medicine.

All I will say is that I disagree.
Image

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More from @benryanwriter

Feb 7
How Can Doctors Like This Provide Competent Care To Their Patients?

Some beef with Dr. Jonathan Howard, by @JesseSingal.
jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-can-doct…
Dr. Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist at @NYULangone Health, is furious at Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skepticmagazine.

Howard is an impressive figure. Like many doctors at university-affiliated medical centers, he also serves as a professor, in this case at the @NYUGrossman School of Medicine. He has, according to his biography, “authored and edited multiple textbooks” on multiple sclerosis, his area of specialty.

Why is Dr. Jonathan Howard furious at @MichaelShermer? It has to do with a recent exchange between Senator Josh Hawley and an OB-GYN named Dr. Nisha Verma. Hawley, seeking to make a point about “gender ideology” (as he might call it) during a hearing, repeatedly asked Verma if men can get pregnant and Verma could not give a straight answer. Shermer chimed in to suggest an answer Verma could have given that accounts for the fact that, as Shermer (and anyone else using the traditional, biological definition of the term) sees it, men cannot, in fact, get pregnant.

That’s why Howard is furious, and that’s why he wrote a deeply aggrieved article in Science-Based Medicine about Shermer’s bigotry. The headline? “The Anti-Trans Obsessions of ‘Skeptic’ Michael Shermer: Hallucinating Imaginary Demons to Empower Actual Villains, Once Again.” The subheadline? “I want to demonstrate to Michael Shermer that it’s possible for men like us to not talk about trans people constantly. If I can do it, so can he.” (If you’re unfamiliar with Science-Based Medicine’s strange recent trajectory, see here or here.)

Not only does Dr. Jonathan Howard of NYU Langone Medical Center disagree with Michael Shermer that men can’t get pregnant — Howard thinks that to even ask this question puts other humans in danger.

That probably sounds like a caricature on my part, or a sloppy and inaccurate gloss of Howard’s actual views. But that’s exactly what he wroteImage
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Jonathan Howard has gotten it into his head, meanwhile, that I am personally responsible for the MAHA movement because once I published an essay on Vinay Prasad’s Substack about trans medicine researchers deceiving the public. This is bonkers conspiracy thinking by Howard.
After @jessesingal explained in exacting detail why the study Jonathan Howard cited as evidence of pediatric gender-transition treatment’s efficacy was bunk, Howard respond with this mischaracterization of what Singal said about Howard’s inability to understand the paper. Image
Read 6 tweets
Feb 6
Dr. Blair Peters,a gender-transition surgeon at OHSU, responds with disdain to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons coming out against such surgeries for minors. He says the broader membership was never polled about this.

Which is the same thing that has happened at the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, but going in the other direction. No matter how hard @JuliaMasonMD1 has pushed, the AAP’s 2018 policy statement on the gender-affirming care method has never been up for a vote by the broader membership.

All of the major medical organizations that have led the way in establishing pediatric gender medicine’s broader credibility, including the AAP and the Endocrine Society in particular, have supported these practices in minors based on the decisions of small committees.

The AAP’s 2018 policy statement was written by a single person, Dr. Jason Rafferty, who was a resident at the time.

All of the other medical societies’ little committees have followed these other groups’ lead, along with WPATH. This has given the illusion that all medial providers support these practices in minors.

But I’ve spoken to pediatricians who are too afraid to express their concerns at the AAP’s annual conference for fear this will destroy their careers.Image
More from Blair Peters: Image
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In 2024, Dr. Blair Peters, aka “Queer Surgeon,” spoke with the head of the ASPS and they had this remarkable exchange about whether doctors can be trusted to self police.

The ASPS president, Dr. Steven Williams, brought up Tuskegee. open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…Image
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Read 6 tweets
Feb 4
People are shocked that all it took for the AMA to change its policy on pediatric gender transition surgeries was for another medical group, the ASPS, to do it. But this phenomenon is how the unanimity among the medical groups fell into place in the first place. It was only ever based on a few small committees within a couple of medical organizations, putting aside WPATH, which is a quasi-activist-medical organization.

It got started in the 2010s as WPATH and the Endocrine Society, which have a lot of overlap between them and referred to one another's guidelines in their citations, put out guidelines. And then in 2018 a single medical resident wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement on the gender-affirming care method. Along the way, other major medical associations took these other groups' lead, including the APA and AMA. And then all the other ones fell in line.

These groups did not conduct major independent analyses of the evidence. Even the AAP never conducted a systematic literature review to support its policy statement. And in August 2023, the AAP said it was going to conduct one. But there is no sign that the organization has even started on that. Because if they ever did, there is only one conclusion that it could have: that the evidence backing providing gender-transition interventions to minors is weak and inconclusive.

All this is to say is that the mantra "all major medical association support gender affirming care for kids" was always a hallow claim. What it really meant is that: "A few small committees at a few organizations decided to support this, in part because of one another, and all the other small committees at all the other organizations followed their lead."
If you want to go down the rabbit hole of how citation laundering laid the groundwork for the supposed medical consensus on gender-transition treatment for minors, I highly recommend @buttonslives's reporting: buttonslives.news/p/new-systemat…Image
@buttonslives Hollow, not hallow*
Read 5 tweets
Feb 2
A Legal First That Could Change Gender Medicine

At 16, Fox Varian got a mastectomy while undergoing a gender transition. She sued her psychologist and plastic surgeon for leaving her ‘disfigured for life.’ Benjamin Ryan reports from the courtroom.

Read the @TheFP article: thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…

Follow and support my Substack, where I cover pediatric gender medicine: benryan.substack.com. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial and will be providing more in-depth reporting and commentary on the case.

The opening of my Free Press article:

Fox Varian had a turbulent childhood. Her parents split when she was seven, triggering a three-year custody battle that ultimately saw her estranged from her father. She suffered from a constellation of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and social phobia. She was diagnosed with autism and bounced around various schools. Her first period sent her into a meltdown, and she battled disordered eating and body-image issues. By mid-adolescence, she was completely lost.

At 15, she began questioning her gender during sessions with her psychologist. She changed her birth name, Isabella, to Gabriel, which she saw as androgynous. Over the next two months, she cut her hair short, began binding her breasts, switched her name again, to Rowan, and started telling people she was transgender.

In December 2019, 11 months after she started this public social transition, Varian underwent surgery to remove her breasts. She was 16 years old.

Varian, who adopted the name Fox at 18 and is now 22, is one of thousands of minors who underwent gender-transition surgery over the past decade. And she is just one of the young people who have come to regret permanently addressing what was only a temporary identity shift.

Three years after her mastectomy, Varian stopped identifying as transgender and began a process known as detransitioning. In May 2023, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the two principal Westchester County, New York, care providers who oversaw her gender transition: her long-time psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, and Dr. Simon Chin, who performed the mastectomy.

On Friday, a jury in White Plains, New York, awarded Varian $2 million in damages. Varian’s case is the first malpractice suit from a detransitioner to go before a jury, and I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. Represented by personal-injury attorney Adam Deutsch, Varian said she had been injured by the defendants due to their deviation from standard practices and a lack of informed consent. While there are no guarantees in medical malpractice lawsuits, legal experts believe Varian’s victory could inspire a wave of similar cases that would significantly disrupt pediatric gender medicine.Image
Claire Deacon, mother to Fox Varian, the detransitioner who won a $2M jury award after suing her care providers over the mastectomy she got at 16, testified that Varian's psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, browbeat her into consenting with threats of her child's suicide.

I report for @TheFP:
thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…

Subscribe to my Substack for further in-depth reporting about the case. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. benryan.substack.comImage
Dr. Loren Schechter, the head of gender-affirming surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and the president-elect of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), testified that gender-transition surgery is not form of suicide prevention. thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…Image
Read 12 tweets
Jan 31
NYU neurologist/psychiatrist Jonathan Howard has been making a stink over @MichaelShermer's recent statements about transgender issues on @BrianLehrer's show.

Here, Howard cites a @Harvard study that falsely claimed youth "rarely" get gender-transition surgeries. In fact, about 1,000 minors got a mastectomy for this purpose annually in recent years, before state bans set in.

I wrote about that Harvard study when it came out. I demonstrated how its authors had quite evidently sought to mislead the public about this issue: benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…

So, in fact, it is not Shermer who is "making things up" about this point in particular, it was Harvard researchers that at least effectively did so.

As for expressing concerns about minors getting these surgeries, I would like Howard to look into the eyes of the mother who testified in the detransitioner civil trial that I just finished attending yesterday (the plaintiff won a $2M judgment against her care providers; my article on the suit will run in a major outlet next week) and tell her that the loss of her daughter's breasts when she was 16 amounts to a false concern.Image
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How Harvard Teed Up the False Claim That the 'Vast Majority of Minors Getting Gender-Affirming Surgeries Are C-s Kids'

An opaquely written Harvard study and linked press release prompted false reporting that gynecomastia surgeries for boys are vastly more common than gender-affirming surgeries for transbenryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…Image
The other day, Howard wrote some screed where he referred to me as a "malignant actor" nefariously pursuing this line of inquiry for money. (Someone suggested that as a cancer survivor, maybe I am intrinsically malignant...) To that I say that Howard might get his facts straight about any of this stuff before he passes judgement on my reporting.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 31
BREAKING: 1st Detransitioner to Take a Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit to Trial Wins $2 Million Judgement

Fox Varian sued her Westchester, NY, area psychologist and plastic surgeon for the gender-transition mastectomy she got at 16.

I was the only reporter to attend the entire 3-week, historic trial. Subscribe to my Substack to receive an alert about the feature article I have coming out next week in a major publication out about the trial: benryan.substack.com. I cover pediatric gender medicine as a specialty on my Substack.

Sorry to just give just a teaser for now about the case! But I wanted to get the word out about the verdict promptly, the slower pace of feature-article publishing notwithstanding.

The entire case file was put under seal when the trial started (although I obtained all those documents before they was sealed), and all the transcripts from the trial are also under seal. The riveting trial was sparsely attended and there was only one other reporter at the trial; and he only attended for part of it and, as I observed, took few notes. So my own hundreds of pages of notes from the trial will likely remain the only way for the public to learn about the all finer details of what transpired, possibly ever (or until an appeal, should that happen).

In addition to my article coming out in the media outlet soon, I intend to write a lot about what I observed and learned on my Substack over the coming weeks. Stay tuned…Image
I have identified 28 detransitioner lawsuits filed to date. Varian v. Einhorn was the first to go to trial and the first to win a judgment, making history. If anyone knows of any additional cases that are not on my spreadsheet below or sees any errors, please DM me.Image
Quite a few of the detransitioner lawsuits have run up against strict statutes of limitation, such as the case against leading pediatric gender doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Attorneys intend to appeal this dismissal, as I wrote in November:
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…Image
Read 4 tweets

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