WSJ columnist compares ‘gender-affirming care’ to lobotomy, cites detransitioner malpractice case
Caroline MolloyA Wall Street Journal opinion columnist compared modern so-called “gender-affirming” medical interventions to the once-widespread practice of lobotomy, arguing that clinicians who subject minors to the sexual procedures are repeating historical medical failures.
In a Feb. 11 column for the Journal’s Free Expression newsletter, author Louise Perry wrote that “the diagnosis of gender dysphoria bewitched the medical community like the brutal brain operation once did.” She drew parallels between contemporary “transgender” medical intervention and the mid-20th-century brain surgery that was once hailed as a breakthrough treatment for mental illness before later being universally condemned as harmful and unethical.
Perry’s essay centers on the case of Fox Varian, a 22-year-old woman who detransitioned after undergoing a double mastectomy at age 16. A jury in White Plains, New York, recently awarded Varian $2 million in a medical malpractice case in which she alleged that a psychologist and plastic surgeon failed to obtain adequate informed consent before the procedure — meaning they did not fully explain the risks, potential complications, long-term consequences, and alternatives before she agreed to undergo the mastectomy.
According to Perry’s account of the trial, Varian’s mother testified that psychologist Kenneth Einhorn repeatedly assured her the surgery would improve her daughter’s well-being and warned she might otherwise commit suicide.
Perry argued that some clinicians involved in so-called “gender-affirming care” should face professional consequences.
“There are many clinicians working in the field of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ who deserve to lose their licenses, plus a few who deserve to go to prison,” she wrote.
“Try and forget, for the moment, the social whirlwind that has surrounded this area of medicine,” Perry wrote, arguing that “the celebrity endorsements, the glossy TV portrayals, the craven journalists” have “served to distract us from what has really been going on.”
Perry urged readers to think about “what is actually involved in trying to make a person superficially look like a member of the opposite sex,” such as “the off-label use of powerful drugs” as well as “the removal of perfectly healthy breasts and genitals.” She also referenced procedures such as colovaginoplasty and phalloplasty, which are attempts “to create new organs out of the wrong tissue” that can lead to disastrous complications.
She cited a 2024 British review led by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, which concluded that the evidence base for youth gender treatments is “remarkably weak.” Perry wrote that “some parts of the medical community are now turning against the use of such interventions for children” and suggested that scrutiny may expand to adult treatments as well.
