The Daily Signal - Transgender Series Part 3: Detransitioner Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Medical malpractice lawsuits on behalf of detransitioners harmed by experimental treatments euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care” will yield multimillion-dollar judgments, a lawyer filing such suits predicts. Ron Miller helped found the law firm Campbell Miller Payne, which represents people who formerly identified as transgender, underwent medical alterations, then rejected their transgender identities, and now lament the harm done to their bodies. These detransitioners are suing their doctors and medical providers for damages in a novel kind of medical malpractice claim. “A troubled youth—typically with either a bad family life or suffering from several psychological comorbidities, such as autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, anorexia, dissociative identity disorders ... will show up to a practitioner stating that they're uncomfortable with their body or [that] they have odd feelings,” Miller tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.” Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, February 9th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Ron Miller, who is a co-founder and partner at the firm Campbell Miller Payne. This law firm is dedicated specifically to representing detransitioners who are suing for medical malpractice after they realized that the doctors had put them down on the path to quote-unquote treatments that left them stunted, scarred and infertile. This is the third podcast interview in a series on transgender phenomena, science, and the potential for medical malpractice lawsuits. In my first interview, I went over rapid onset gender dysphoria and the idea that there's this phenomenon where typically teen girls are identifying as transgender because of a

social contagion and not because they have a deep-rooted identity as male, but because they're because they are struggling with dealing with puberty and with other underlying mental health issues. The second interview spoke about how mental health professionals divide parents and children, pitting many kids against their parents, telling them that if the parents don't agree with a stated transgender identity, that they don't love their kids or don't understand them. This interview goes into another key aspect of this entire phenomenon, which is that many of the people who were led down this path by many doctors who ostensibly, you know, pushed aside the normal standards of care and really rushed kids who are struggling with many mental health issues that could have been resolved through therapy, theoretically, rushed them down a path of medicalization that led them. them to take these experimental drugs, many of these cross-sex hormones, they change your body chemistry long term. So you have to continue to take injections even after you stop identifying

as transgender. So what happens is, like for a woman, she gets shots of testosterone that messes up her internal chemistry and her body no longer produces estrogen naturally. So even when she later rejects that male identity and wants to return, wants to reaffirm her body's natal sex, you know, her real biological sex, she has to take shots of estrogen to compensate for that time period that she was on testosterone. So there are so many different aspects of harm here. And Ron Miller sat down with me and broke down, you know, it's fascinating. He put a dollar amount on what he thinks the judgments in these cases are going to reach. It's in the millions. I'll just tease you with that. He also spoke to me, and I thought this was very moving.

He said that unfortunately, our court system is limited in only being able to provide compensation for these kinds of injuries in the form of dollars. And juries have a very difficult task of translating these intangible lifelong injuries into a monetary figure that could somehow compensate for them. The idea that a monetary figure could compensate for it is something that's really hard to grasp. And when you're talking about something like never being able to have children, or constantly having to take medical injections throughout the rest of your life because of a mistake that you made briefly for a few years when you were. teen or when you were a young adult. I mean, these things are just too horrifying to really

capture and imagine. So anyway, listen to my interview with Ron Miller right after this. This is Mike Howell at the Heritage Foundation. I know how the left and the deep state operate because I've seen it from the inside. When I was working for the Trump administration, I learned how the left made our lives miserable and how they continued to think they could play by their own rules. Well, now we're taking all these tricks and tactics. tactics that were deployed against the Trump administration and turning them against the Biden regime. Through the work of the Oversight Project, we're exposing left for what they are and embarrassing some actors responsible. We're using strategic foias and fearless litigation to force these bureaucrats to deliver documents they'd prefer to never see the light of day.

But for our work to be successful, we need patriots like you to stand with us. You can take action now. Visit heritage.org slash oversight to learn more. There's no time to waste. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal. I'm honored to be joined by Ron Miller, who is the Miller in Campbell Miller Payne, a law firm dedicated to representing detransitioners. It's great to have you, Ron. Thank you. Yes, great to be here.

So we were talking a little bit about how you got into the issue. You came from a commercial litigation background, and then this issue just really started weighing on your heart. Yeah, that's right. You know, I was a commercial litigator for the most of my career, and my wife and I had encountered this issue through some social media and started praying about it. And at a point in time where I was looking to see what I was going to do with my career, my partner, Jordan Campbell, the Campbell in Campbell Miller Payne, was discussing with me a potential that we could bring lawsuits on behalf of detransitioners to help them seek justice when they've been harmed by this practice. And so how did you get started and, why, you know, why is this issue important to you personally? Yeah. So, you know, we started out with just discussion about what kind of, what the lawsuits would look like, what it would take to set up a firm to do this. And it was very important to both of us, actually, all of us in the firm, because we're believers. We felt like we were being called to further the defense of really our identity in Christ as, as a society, but also just individually we were being called to represent these detransitioners who had been.

just taking advantage of and misguided through this medical system. And so when we were looking at the law firm, we thought the cases would be few and far between, but absolutely worth taking and whatever kind of expense or even professional or personal risk it would expose to us. It was one of those missions that we just felt dedicated to getting the right team together and, you know, doing as much good as we can. And we were actually surprised. It was only a couple weeks. into setting up the firm before we started getting our first clients and being able to actually put pen to paper on some of these lawsuits. So medical malpractice, what, you know, does that entail, what do you have to prove, and what are the biggest stumbling blocks? Yeah, that's a good question.

And it varies based on the state the case is brought. Medical malpractice in Texas, for example, we have one case in Texas, is a much different to much more difficult case to bring in Texas almost than anywhere else in the United States because of the statutes that require certain procedural steps be taken before you can even file a lawsuit against a medical provider in the state of Texas. But typically what's required is that you have enough medical documentation or evidence or at least, you know, you have a client with a story and testimony that establishes that some standard of care, some medical standard of care was not followed or was neglected or was ignored in providing the medical treatments that ultimately caused the client harm. And so,

So in these cases, for detransitioners, what it looks like and what we've seen time and time again is that a troubled youth typically with a either bad family life or suffering from several kind of psychological comorbidities such as autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, even dyslexia, yeah, absolutely, you know, dissociative identity disorder. I mean, some very, very serious and substantial psychological issues will present and show up to a practitioner stating that they're, you know, uncomfortable with their body or they, you know, they have odd feelings. And this is usually at a young age. So maybe we're talking pre-pubescent teenage. Typically, it's trending towards the females. So, you know, you're looking at a, you know, 12, 13-year-old girl who goes and sees a therapist saying that I'm uncomfortable with my body. I don't like it. I'm getting odd looks from people. I don't feel comfortable around my peer group. You know, things that you or I might just associate with going through puberty. But if this, you know, 13-year-old girl shows up to the wrong practitioner, and this practitioner is focused on this, you know, transgender ideology. They will often look at that before looking at any of the other

comorbidities and say, look, you're, you were born into the wrong body. So you're actually a boy trapped in a girl's body, and we need to put you on testosterone. And this usually takes place. What we're seeing from just looking at each of our clients' stories as they come in, this takes place after 30 to 45 minutes, the first visit they will diagnose and issue a prescription for testosterone for this female at an unusually high dosage because they have to counteract the body's own production of estrogen in a female. Or they'll issue the testosterone in addition to a puberty blocker that will stop the production and stop puberty for that prepubescent adolescent.

And so doing this, obviously, after only a 30-minute meeting, they have not ruled out any other potential avenue, right? They've jumped straight to the medicalization and to putting this person on the transgender medicalization process. And so doing that, you know, obviously ignores the fact that maybe this child was suffering from depression, anxiety. Maybe the child is just suffering from normal teenage angst that accompanies, you know, puberty. That was never, in our cases, that's never the case where the practitioner actually discusses those with them. Never presents psychotherapy. as an option straight to the prescription of the drugs and then to eventually onto surgeries.

So when it comes to proving a failure to follow standards of care, you know, we've been seeing W. Path, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, has their own, quote-unquote, standards of care. There are problems with it. There are standards of care that I believe Governor Ron DeSantis's administration down in Florida is developing. But as you noted, a lot of cases, these are comorbidities, do you rely on standards of care for those diagnoses? Which standards of care are the ones you are relevant for these cases? Yeah, these cases are so new that there really is no agreed upon standard of care nationwide or in any of the states. The W-Path standards, quote, unquote, that you referenced are not true standards, and even the W-Path states that they are not true standards.

their set of guidelines that practitioners should follow. We, in our cases, we do not agree that those are even sufficient standards for this type of permanent and irreversible medicalization. But typically those standards still require at least a year worth of therapy, a year or more worth of experience as a, you know, that patient experiencing life as a transgender person before the practitioner is supposed to. to take them down the medicalization path of testosterone or surgery. Because those steps are, like I said, irreversible and often have, you know, life-destroying ramifications such as sterility, you know, infertility, all sorts of bone density issues, and their bodies just essentially stop producing the hormones that they were originally going

to produce had the testosterone or estrogen, whichever case it may be, had that not been introduced to their system at such an early age. But yeah, so what we in our cases do is we look to just the general standard of care for any medical provider when there is no specific standard of care governing, which is to first do no harm, and second, do what's in the patient's best medical interest. And so in each of these cases, the practitioners have failed to satisfy either of those basic standards of care because their priorities focusing on medicalization when other therapies were potentially available but not explored or discovered or ruled out, that's first,

you know, they are doing harm to the patient because of these long-term effects on the body without having first ruled out the less medically invasive procedures. So this is a new arena of law. I don't believe we've ever seen a detransitioner's medical malpractice suit fully adjudicated before. And I think we were talking yesterday about the potential for very large legal settlements and in cases where there is a ruling of malpractice. You know, what do you expect? What do you see? What developments do you anticipate going forward? And if you had to guess, what would a settlement like that look like? Yeah, it's really hard to predict because as you noted, we really just haven't seen a case all the way to

that point yet. All we have to look at are similar, really unfortunate situation of, situations of gross malpractice across the medical profession, but it's rare that situation presents where the practitioner is not only ignoring their very clear duty to, you know, prescribe the least medically invasive route possible and, you know, the least intervention there, but where they're jumping straight to a life-changing and permanent and harmful course of treatment based on little to know evidentiary or scientific support. So this entire practice has no good research supporting it. Even the advocates of this practice now acknowledge that the studies in the past from 2012 to 2018

even have been subjected to further scrutiny and have been determined to be low to very low quality studies. And so, you know, this practice is conducted on no foundation and it's a plightly. against children. And so now we have a situation that it's not only a bad medical practice, an experimental medical practice, but it's being applied against the most vulnerable of our society, the children and not only just children, but usually and typically female children with who are already suffering from psychological comorbidities. And so it is quite literally the most vulnerable of us are being targeted and disproportionately suffering from these medicalization processes. With lifelong impacts that could lead to extremely large, I mean, medical bills alone for the individual,

but then that also plays into the sort of settlement that you might see. Well, absolutely. So if you're looking at just the medical expenses associated, you're looking at first the misdiagnosis and the misprescription of the cross-sex hormone for the patient for the period of time that they were on that cross-sex hormone. But once that cross-sex hormone is introduced and the body stops produce, the normal and the typical hormone if that person, one of our patients, de-transitions and wants to come off the cross-ex hormone, let's say for a girl, she wants to stop taking the

testosterone. Well, now she's going to need to supplement her own body's production of estrogen with an estrogen prescription. So you're looking at lifelong medical issues that are going to require, you know, pharmaceutical drugs and therapies and treatments that just will never end. do you hurt she's going to have bone density issues because she went through a period of her development where her bones were just you know affected by cross-sex hormone that had it just did not work with her body and so that creates long-term development issues that will you know have to be

treated by specialists and medications and so you're looking at a lifelong yeah medical bill but then you're also looking at consequences like if it's you know infertility so how do you assign a value to the pain and the lost opportunity to have a child for our clients who have taken the step, not only just the testosterone or puberty blockers, but also a double mastectomy, for example, and had the healthy breast tissue removed before that girl could ever understand or appreciate what it would be like to breastfeed her child, having that opportunity taken from her. And of course, these consequences aren't discussed with, with them in that 30 minute intake interview before they get put on these hormones.

But, you know, how do you assign monetary values to that? It's a really difficult thing to predict. And it's one of those things that these cases need to be and go before juries of their peers so that the jury can handle that question of, you know, what is that worth to a person to have that taken from them? You know, our court system, unfortunately, is limited in only being able to provide compensation for these kind of injuries in the form of dollars. And so every jury has the very difficult task of translating these kind of intangible, you know, lifelong injuries into a monetary figure that could, you know, compensate. I don't know that there's a figure high enough to handle that kind of pain. Would you ballpark an estimate? It would be in the, you know, millions, I think, for sure. I would

say, you know, based on our research, we, you know, expect a jury verdict to come back anywhere from, you know, $10 to $20 million in the sense of if a jury, you know, is presented with these facts and the gross negligence of this medical provider is fully on trial. That I would see the ballpark of a verdict in that range. So what's the defense? I mean, you've filed a few of these lawsuits. Have you seen defenses from the doctors, I mean, it's like, especially in a case where they rush the ball and they put these children on these on these puberty blockers, on these cross-sex hormones in less than three months and even W-paths as it needs to be a year. How do they defend themselves? Yeah. So there's a few different, you know, defenses that we see time and time again. And that's if they're defending

against the quick timeline, they say it was a matter of, you know, life or death. That's right. Yeah, They say that, you know, they had to get this process started because if they wouldn't, this patient would be at a high risk of suicide and so that this was necessary medical treatment to be almost applied in an emergency situation. Now, the studies and, you know, the stories that our clients are living proof of is that that's just not the case. The studies that originally suggested that the suicide rate was higher and that this might be a necessary medical intervention. to prevent suicide have been debunked. And that's just actually the further studies have showed that inverse is true, that after the medicalization, the suicide rates increase, because I think, you know, people are realizing what they've done to their bodies now

and how permanent and irreversible it is. But, you know, that's one of the defenses we encounter. But more so we encounter procedural defenses. And that's from the state legislatures that have enacted tort reform or other kind of laws that make it very difficult to bring personal injury lawsuits in the state, especially medical malpractice lawsuits. In some states, the timeline that detransitioner would have to bring their lawsuit would be one year after the acts were committed that.

And often the detransitioner isn't even aware of the deception that they were subjected to within this one year period. And so it becomes a very procedural, a very kind of technical defense where the defendants say, look, even if we were wrong, they didn't bring the case quick enough. So, you know, and that, that tends to work because those laws are very clear in the, in the timeline that a person has to bring a lawsuit. So if, you know, speaking hypothetically, if people want to have the system enable detransitioners to get the justice that they're seeking, they may have to pursue legal reforms. Yeah. You know, for true justice to be achieved in this situation,

where you have an entire group of medical professionals essentially misguiding young and impressionable people. You got a situation where the ones who are supposed to be the learned intermediaries, as the case law talks about, the ones who are supposed to look at a situation and apply sound medical reasoning to the situation, the ones who the patients are just by our very culture and society taught to trust and not to second guess and not to question whether this physician has their best medical interests at heart. You know, you're in a situation of really large power imbalance. And this patient could go years and years before they realized that it was their doctor who had misled them, somebody who they trusted with their most intimate life decisions. And so you definitely need some reform in the sense of. of you've got to have statutes that distinguish this situation from the typical medical malpractice

case that the law is currently designed to handle, which is that of, you know, the surgery where a sponge is left inside and the, you know, person discovers it later on. Well, that's, that's not something where it's a continuing course of treatment under a misguided or misleading kind of practitioner who's continuing the deception as, as a course, And so these are very different situations that, unfortunately, the statutes as currently written just don't treat fairly, just because of the nature. They're so different, even though they would still fall under medical malpractice claims. Have you or any of your partners experienced cancel culture, demonization, perhaps being misquoted in the media or attacked in some way? Not to any significant degree.

We tend to keep a low media profile for that reason. This is really, it's not about us. We started the law firm to highlight our clients and to highlight the issue through them. Each of our clients are kind of given the option as far as how public they would like to make their case. Most of them, in fact, all of them are much more focused on the change that their case and the publicity of their case can bring than they are to the prospect of a financial, out award at the end of the case. So they're very, they're very interested in doing what they can to share their story and to make that heard. And not just by the public, but also by the medical profession. They want other medical practitioners to know that these cases are out there, the ones

who are considering to, you know, the next patient that comes in their door, you know, putting somebody on this course of treatment without following the proper standards of care, they want them to be concerned. They want the insurance companies to be aware that not only just the malpractice insurance companies, but also the medical insurance companies, to be aware that these practitioners are out there miscoding the medical records so that insurance will pay for these procedures, that they're listing these procedures as medically necessary when often this is just a diagnosis that's given after a 30-minute appointment, and there could be no possible way to determine that's medically necessary at that point in time. And so, you know, there's just a lot of

of different things that, you know, these cases bring to light. And that's, that's an important aspect of, of the lawsuits. But as far as whether, you know, we don't get a lot of that attention, our clients do more so than us. And mostly because our clients are more public about their stories. And so they'll be on Twitter or any of their social media platforms talking about the case or talking about their story. And that's where we see the most backlash coming from. Do you see this effort, you mentioned being a believer, Do you see this effort as helping the least of these, those who've been preyed upon by the system? And what's the outcome that you and your team are looking for? Absolutely.

This is a very odd, I guess, category of our society. Because originally, when a person decides to pursue this course, they become, you know, they're transgender. Now they're already societal outcast to some degree. And so at that point in their life, they've already kind of taken the step into this group that is ostracized by the majority of our culture and society. But then when they choose to detransition, now they're leaving that already ostracized group, who happens to be very exclusive. So once a detransitioner leaves, they lose the support of that even their transgendered friends and supporters that they, previously experienced whenever they did transition. And then they're going back into a world that still sees them as transgender. So they've kind of become the smallest and the most ostracize of either of the,

you know, either group because they've not only made that first initial transgender decision, but then also now are leaving that group and that support. And so they are, you know, quite the most alone. They feel alone. They feel like they have no support. And they really, you know, one of our efforts and one of the efforts of a lot of, you know, a lot of the organizations we work with is to develop these support structures for detransitioners who are experiencing this kind of, you know, nobody claims them kind of situation. And so as far as our lawsuit, it was absolutely designed to help detransitioners seek justice just simply because there's nobody else doing it. There's nobody else that was trying to help them or would give them, you know, the time of day to look at their case and see, you know,

were these kids or adolescents wronged by the medical profession? They were ostracized and they needed help. And so we stepped up. And I believe you told me your clients don't pay for your services. You offer them pro bono. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's not exactly pro bono, but we do take these cases on a contingency fee only. So clients never pay for any of the cost expenses or any of the attorney fee time.

put into the case until any award is received from the outcome of the case, whether by settlement or by verdict. And so in that case, yeah, the client never pays any money directly for their representation. It would only come if they win the case and out of the proceeds from winning the case, they would pay for the attorney's fees, cost, expenses of bringing the lawsuit. So where can our listeners find your law firm, perhaps help in whatever way? Yeah. So they can always be found at online. Our website is www.combellmillerpane.com or you can also find us at www.Dtranslaw.com. We could always use help just in the form of prayers, but also just, you know, well wishes. And we're always looking to connect with medical providers who are aware of the breaches, the standards of care that this kind of process represents and are willing to speak up. about it. We always need expert witnesses in our case that have an expertise in these fields and are willing to speak up against the practice. And obviously, also, we are in need of, you know,

making connections with potential victims out there who have undergone this treatment and are looking for somebody to help them seek justice. We take cases in all 50 states. We have a vast network of local attorneys and teams willing to help bring these cases in any jurors. that we find plaintiff, you know, needing and needing our help. And which detransitioners that our audience might have heard of do you represent? So we represent Prisha Mosley, has been fairly public about her case. Orrne Aldaco, newly filed cases in Rhode Island against the AAP, Dr. Rafferty and 4CA for our clients there.

They're not as public yet, as the defendants. are public, but as far as the plaintiffs, they're not as socially public yet. But we've also, you know, we're working and helping on each of the cases that are going forward. And, you know, the Chloe Cole cases and some of the various whistleblowers that have come out, our law firm helps represent. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Ron. And yeah, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. And that was Ron Miller. Again, this is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal. If you liked what you heard, heard here, please leave us a five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback. And don't

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