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.
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.
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.
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.com
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…
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a strong believer in Affirmative Action for thee but not for me when it came to hiring her law clerks. She needed the best to outsmart Scalia.
So, she hired one black clerk, Paul Watford, out of her 159 clerks.
1 out of 159.
Should Supreme Court justices be as ruthlessly meritocratic and colorblind in hiring law clerks as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, or should African-Americans be handed by quota, say, 5% representation in such an influential job?
This important question is seldom debated in the press because the thoroughly documented size of the racial gap at the far right edge of the intelligence bell curve is so so large, yet so unknown, that any expert who mentions the data sounds to normies like an insane racist.
🙈 Здесь будет тред про самые адовые налоговые фейлы, которые совершили айтишники-эмигранты из РФ в 2026 году. Разбираем на примере реальных ситуаций, произошедших с обладателями зарубежных счетов.
Как говорится: 1 лайк = 1 факт о налоговых страданиях и боли!
1. В программе планируется: штраф 40% за продажу квартиры в Дубае, московские налоговики начали сверять расходы россиян с их задекларированными доходами, и как неумение держать язык за зубами в беседе с налоговым инспектором может создать проблем на ровном месте.
2. == Фейл №1 (авансом вам выдам его) ==
Айтишник Аркадий в 2022 году уехал из России в Дубай и купил там себе квартиру. А в 2024 году продал ее другому эмигрировавшему айтишнику Борису (у которого тоже был российский паспорт).
1/ .@FD_Nieuws publiceert een artikel over Israëlische wijn uit de Westelijke Jordaanoever.
Het wordt gepresenteerd als economische journalistiek.
De insteek en bronkeuze geven het karakter van politieke positionering.
(Auteur: @EugenieDHooghe)
2/ De openingszin stelt dat de sector “rust op landonteigening en een systeem van kolonistengeweld”.
Dat is geen neutrale beschrijving. Dat is een normatieve kwalificatie nog voordat de feitelijke analyse begint.
3/ Bronselectie:
– Activistische onderzoeker
– Direct betrokken partij in het conflict
– Peter Malcontent (uitgesproken in dit dossier)
Geen Israëlische jurist.
Geen handelsrecht-expert.
Geen tegengeluid.
Dat roept vragen op over balans.
After 3 years of using Claude, I can say that it is the technology that has revolutionized my life the most, along with the Internet.
So here are 10 prompts that have transformed my day-to-day life and that could do the same for you:
1. Research
Mega prompt:
You are an expert research analyst. I need comprehensive research on [TOPIC].
Please provide: 1. Key findings from the last 12 months 2. Data and statistics with sources 3. Expert opinions and quotes 4. Emerging trends and predictions 5. Controversial viewpoints or debates 6. Practical implications for [INDUSTRY/AUDIENCE]
Format as an executive brief with clear sections. Include source links for all claims.
Additional context: [YOUR SPECIFIC NEEDS]
2. Writing white papers
Mega prompt:
You are a technical writer specializing in authoritative white papers.
Write a white paper on [TOPIC] for [TARGET AUDIENCE].
Structure:
- Executive Summary (150 words)
- Problem Statement with market data
- Current Solutions and their limitations
- Our Approach/Solution with technical details
- Case Studies or proof points
- Implementation framework
- ROI Analysis
- Conclusion and Call to Action
I scraped every single NotebookLM prompt that blew up on X, Reddit, and academic corners of the internet.
Turns out most people are using NotebookLM like a fancy note-taker.
That's insane.
It's a full-blown research assistant that can compress 10 hours of analysis into 20 seconds if you feed it the right instructions.
Here's what actually works:
Prompt 1: The Expert Synthesizer
"You are a [field] expert with 15 years of experience. Analyze these sources and identify the 3 core insights that practitioners in this field would immediately recognize as groundbreaking. For each insight, explain why it matters and what conventional wisdom it challenges."
This forces depth over breadth. The output is immediately usable.
Prompt 2: The Contradiction Hunter
"Compare these sources and identify every point where they contradict each other. For each contradiction, explain which source has stronger evidence and why. If both are credible, explain what factors might explain the disagreement."
Perfect for literature reviews and due diligence. Saves hours of manual cross-referencing.
Tbf there’s a weird problem with how Biden & Obama went about good trans policy.
They tended to set policy quietly at the level of the administrative state, but then avoid messaging around it, and eschewed legislative means that require you to win a political/narrative battle.
This really contributed to the sense that trans policy prescriptions “came out of nowhere” and were “shoved down our throats” for lots of regular people.
In fact most strides for trans people in the last 20 years happened this way: court rulings on Title IX, private administrative bodies issuing rules, medical boards issuing guidance on care, ACA guidance on trans health coverage, etc. It came through an alphabet soup of acronym agencies and boards and bodies—NCAA, IOC, APA, AAP, AMA, etc—handing down rules that governed trans people’s rights to participate in public life and receive healthcare.
The policy was good! And it was based on evidence and motivated by an effective elite-outreach activist strategy that lobbied rule makers, judges, and administrators. This is not at all, morally or empirically, bad. It was however *politically* vulnerable, because it didn’t entail building a broad coaliton that was actually persuaded of arguments in favor of trans people’s rights and interests. It wasn’t durable, and it remained open to be overruled by a popular coalition organized against it. And that’s exactly what the Right realized and executed.
It’s entirely understandable why trans advocacy took this approach: in a very real sense, it worked! We got a slew of good rules that protected our rights and made it possible for more people to transition who wanted to transition. But it was always vulnerable.
It also makes sense why Dems took this approach—it seemed like a low salience issue, and the broad, deep sea change in public opinion on homosexuality seemed to imply that maybe there *was* broad support for these policies. And probably there could’ve been!
1/13
Привіт! Мене звати Вадим Адамов.
До вторгнення я працював режисером. В лютому 2022 мені виповнилось 18 років, і почалась повномасштабка. Я одразу долучився до Збройних Сил,
і наступні три роки - постійно працював поруч зі смертю.
2/13
Піхота, перше поранення, аеророзвідка, Рік в Бахмуті, півроку на Роботинському та Авдіївському напрямках, друге поранення. Десятки втрачених друзів.
3/13
Я віддалявся від цивільних. Я не ділився думками зі світом. Творчіть, яка раніше поєднувала мене з зовнішім світом, тепер зламалась. Я не знав як поєднати цивільний і військовий світи. Здавалось що ми більше ніколи не зрозуміємо один одного.
¿Héroe de la cristiandad o mercenario oportunista? Nos han vendido la imagen de un cruzado santo que luchaba por Dios, pero la realidad histórica de Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar es mucho más sucia, compleja y fascinante. Esta es la historia del Cid Campeador. Tira del hilo 🧵👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
Para empezar, olvida la película de Hollywood. Rodrigo nació alrededor de 1048 en Vivar, cerca de Burgos, en una familia de la baja nobleza. No era un gran señor, sino un "infanzón" que tuvo que ganarse el pan con la espada, ascendiendo por puro talento militar y carisma.
Su leyenda comienza con un destierro real. El rey Alfonso VI lo expulsó de Castilla, posiblemente por celos o por malversación de impuestos, y no por la romántica Jura de Santa Gadea, que es una invención literaria posterior para dejar mal al rey.
1/2 That map is worth a thousand words.
Makes me speechless 🙂👍
All counterattacks by the Ukrainian armed forces are about to achieve their goal." The progress continues. "
That statement reflects solid confidence.
2/2 It makes us understand that Ukraine's operations are not symbolic gestures, but coordinated efforts that produce concrete results. Counter-attacks hit intended targets.
Keeping up the pressure.
The land will be fought and taken back. "
..#Jänschwalde, des letzten Braunkohletagebaus in Brandenburg ebenfalls bereits für 2030.
Der Betrieb lohne sich nicht mehr, so die LEAG.
Die LEAG, die die Tagebaue und Kraftwerke 2016 von Vattenfall übernommen hatte, will die Lausitz als Energieregion neu erfinden...
3/4
...Mit Investitionen in der Größe von etwa 10 Mrd. €, großen Windparks & Solaranlagen, Batteriespeichern im GWh-Bereich und Kraftwerken, die mit grünem Wasserstoff laufen sollen.
Das Braunkohle-Großkraftwerk "Schwarze Pumpe" (1.600 MW, Rang 8 der größten CO₂-Verursacher..