The Highwire with Del Bigtree - $2M VERDICT A TURNING POINT IN GENDER MEDICINE

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

A landmark jury verdict holding clinicians liable for malpractice tied to a teen gender-transition surgery is being viewed as a pivotal moment in the national debate over pediatric gender medicine. The ruling intensifies legal scrutiny, signals expanding statutes of limitations, and raises new questions from state and federal authorities about evidence standards, oversight, and the adequacy of informed consent in youth gender-related medical interventions.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

In our space here in the health journalism, in the medical space, medical choice, really the biggest story this week is a detransitioner has won a court case against a doctor and their psychiatrist for medical malpractice. Here it is. Jerry finds doctors liable for malpractice in gender surgery lawsuit. Let's look at the facts here. A jury on January 30th found a psychologist and surgeon liable for malpractice after they supported and performed breast removal surgery on a 16-year-old girl. who at the time identified as transgender. Foxvaryan, now 22, and no longer identifying as transgender,

was awarded $2 million in damages. 1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering, and another 400,000 for future medical expenses. Delt, this is the natural course of medical products and procedures when they don't have liability protection like vaccines. We're seeing how courts actually handle these things. And so just to get into this court case a little bit,

the person in question that just won this award, suffering from depression, anxiety, was diagnosed with autism, and this is one of the reasons they won was because their doctor, their psychologists, deviated from the standard of care to go through this procedure and did not give full informed consent. Now, this court case is sealed, so we're going from the reporting. Reporters were there. One of them, Benjamin Ryan, he's an independent journalist. He put together a spreadsheet just to show you where this is going. This is going. This is a the first court case here, but by his account, 28 more other cases nationwide, this is where this is going. And we can see, I want to paint this picture here because it really looks

like this is the start of the end for the, I want to call it the cottage industry within hospitals and gender care at university hospitals that are rushing these kids through without informed consent, deviating from the standard of care. And these lawsuits are probably going to start coming a lot faster. It doesn't stop. One of the big issues these lawsuits are running up against is the statute of limitations. So for medical malpractice is usually about one to three years,

depending on which state you bring these lawsuits in. But what states are doing now is they're extending it in special cases for gender affirming care, for those type of lawsuits. So we have a list of states now that have expanded that. Arkansas, 15 years after they turn 18, Tennessee, 30 years after they turn 18. Missouri, Florida also extending it.

So you have this massive extension of the statute of limitations for gender affirming care lawsuits and other states most likely are going to follow. And this all started in 2023 really from the state level. When you saw whistleblower go to Missouri, the Missouri AG, and basically Missouri was one of the first states to outlaw gender affirming care for minors. And you saw the officials there. They're looking at these youth clinics. Since then, two have been closed down.

One of the people that testified and gave an affidavit to the Attorney General of Missouri was Jamie Reed. Jamie Reed has been kind of just tearing through at state houses across the United States testifying. She's a whistleblower. Here's our most recent whistleblower testimony in Nebraska. Take a listen. Okay. When I started working in the center, I would be what you would refer to as a true believer. I not only believed that such a thing as a trans child existed, but I believed that the earlier we could intervene, the better in the long-term outcome. This is kind of what we talk about in autism services

or other services with kids. If we start an intervention early, perhaps we'll make it better for their life. It wasn't necessarily that my bias changed. I'm still from the community, I'm still a lesbian, I was married to a trans-identified adult at the time. What changed was the actual evidence in front of me. So what I started to see, first of all,

is that these patients were not getting better, so their mental health was not improving, although that's what's promised in the intervention, that their mental health will get better. It wasn't happening. But also what we saw, which we've seen internationally, is there has been a complete, absolute, social contagion element that just tore through this industry. When I started in 2018, we had four new patients per month, and they were almost all pre-pubital boys who acted very feminine. When I left, we had 60 new patients per month, and almost every single one of them was a trans-identified adolescent girl who had multiple mental health comorbidities who had been sucked into trans as an identity, who had been sucked into it from social media, from their COVID lockdowns, from their school. This completely tore through this industry in an unprecedented way. The reason why we talk about this at all is because there was one of the, one of the people, the largest social contagions to ever happen in adolescents and girls rip through this country

over this. 17 systematic reviews of evidence have been done globally. These are huge projects. Every single one of those 17 systematic reviews of evidence has come to the unequivocal conclusion that there is no quality evidence to support the medical transition. of a child, period. Those were reviews that the country of Finland did, that the country of Sweden did, that Norway did, that the UK did. We're not talking about one person at a hospital writing a paper. We're talking about entire nations reviewed all of the evidence you could find,

and there is not a single, single paper of systematic review that supports doing this. It's so powerful, Jeffrey. To see one case, like the first case of its kind win on behalf of this poor young lady who was, you know, manipulated into making a choice that she would not be happy about in the future. But I wonder about all these doctors that performed these things, that were going along with what seemed like, you know, the new standard of care. And moving forward, they must be quaking in their boots right now. you know thinking about you know you know how many of my patients could turn on me

and could come back on me you know I was just doing what I thought was right and for those doctors I just want to say you deserve it frankly this goes so far beyond common sense I mean the idea that you were gonna rob someone of their puberty that you were gonna make it this you're gonna make it mean such a permanent decision for a child when we don't give them any we don't allow them any other permanent decisions for their life. What rush was there? Why couldn't they wait until after 18 and manipulating parents into it, all of it, you know, whether or not you were manipulated or there was too many people around you, we are supposed to be able to trust that you were working

on instinct and really looking at the science. There was none here. So for every doctor that ends up losing their license over this, good riddance, in all honesty, good riddance. Absolutely. And the doctors and the surgeons, they were the engine that led this, as Jamie Reed said, this social contagion. They were the ones that drove this for minor children that were just rushed through this process. So the dominoes are really stacking up here. You have lawsuits beginning to build. Statue limitations, stretching, so more people can be included in these lawsuits. You have at the state level, you have whistleblowers coming out. But now the federal level is pushing their thumb on this. So right before Christmas, you had HHS come out and they put to

together their review. This is over 400 pages, highly cited, and this is their treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria review of evidence and best practice. And I want to go over the conclusion here and read this because this is very important. So the central theme of this review is that many U.S. medical professionals and associations have fallen short of their duty to prioritize the health interests of young patients. First, there was a rapid expansion and implementation of a clinical protocol that lacked sufficient scientific and ethical justification. Second, when confronted with compelling evidence that this protocol did not deliver the health benefits it promise and that other countries were changing their policies appropriately

U.S. medical professionals and associations failed to reconsider the gender-affirming approach. Third, conflicting evidence, evidence that challenged the fundamental assumptions of the protocol and the professional standing of its advocates was mischaracterized or insufficiently acknowledged. Finally, dissenting perspectives were marginalized and those who voiced them were disparaged, just like the pandemic. And right after that document came out, we have had Secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., say this. Take look. This morning I signed a declaration, sex rejecting procedures are neither safe nor effective treatment for children with gender dysphoria. These procedures failed to me professionally

recognized standards of care. Medical professionals or entities providing sex rejecting procedures to children are out of compliance with these standards of health care. This declaration is a clear directive to providers to follow the science and the overwhelming body of evidence that these procedures hurt not help children. Additionally, CMS is proposing two new rules. The first rule will bar hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid, which is almost every hospital, from performing these dangerous and harmful procedures. The second rule prohibits the federal Medicaid dollars from funding the sex rejecting procedures on minors. Furthermore, HHS is also moving to reverse the Biden administration's attempt to include gender dysphoria within the definition of

disability. Just in this one space alone, imagine where we'd be had, you know, the election gone a different direction. I mean, thank God we've got this reasonable man in HHS and someone that's, you know, allowing science to be done, not afraid to question the science, and doesn't care who, you know, the interested parties are, we're going to get to the bottom of it. So thank God, I mean, it's really amazing. And we're talking about children here, and it's not hard to predict at this point

what direction things are going to start moving. So you saw a headline here just a couple days ago out of Utah. University of Utah suddenly ends, suddenly ends all remaining healthcare for transgender youth pointing to expected ban. So they're anticipating a full-scale state and federal ban. They're out of the business at this point. They're done.

And you're probably going to see a lot of our headlines suddenly changing course. What's interesting here because there's another side of this conversation. There's still people fighting here. And it's interesting because anytime we find a conversation where there's some ambiguity or some lack of science, you find the American Academy of Pediatrics on the other end of that. And they're no different on this one. Remember, the American Academy of Pediatrics argued the opposite of the American Academy of Pediatrics argued the opposite of the American Academy of Pediatrics. the opposite of this point that's happening right now.

This is their policy paper. They were trying to change nationwide policy. They did a pretty good job of it for a couple of years. This was in 2023, prohibition of gender affirming care as a form of child maltreatment. They wanted to reframe the discussion. There are two main points in reframing the discussion. First, they wanted to refute the idea

that gender affirming care is child mistreatment. And secondly, and most importantly, they wanted to demonstrate how withholding gender affirming care as harmful to children amounts to state, sanction, medical neglect, and emotional abuse. If they had their way, the lawsuits would be going a lot different right now. They'd actually be going against doctors that didn't do it fast enough. And so the remaining states

that are still allowing this, they're pushing back. In fact, here's California, Attorney General, Sue's Redi Children's Hospital for curtailing gender affirming care. And then the next one here, New York, this is all kind of in the same basket. New York and other states, Sue Fez to protect 300 billion threatened by gender policy rules. So $300 billion states collectively receiving government funding to basically, it's a contingent now upon these new rules that Kennedy is putting in. So they're going to lose that funding. So they have gone to the courts to sue the Trump administration to try to keep that funding. And these are now a minority of states. So we look at this map here and you can see the states that are shaded have laws against gender affirming care

in transitioning of minors. The ones that don't are also part of this lawsuit. So Oregon, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Minnesota, you have New York, obviously, Vermont, Washington, Rhode Island. They're all part of this lawsuit. I'm assuming they're all the most of the same states that are deciding to go along with the AAP on double vaccinating the children over the new vaccine program that's available to the rest of the country through the change made by Robert Kennedy Jr. I mean, it's like, you know, the stupid state. Maybe that's what we call them from here on out. The stupid states are now requiring that you, you know, cut the genitals off of your children

and double vaccinate them, even though that is not even acceptable in Denmark or Germany or the other countries that we're now following. Yeah, most of them are. And I hate to use the word anti-science because it was leveraged so hard against people like you and I when we report facts during the pandemic. But it really seems like it's the anti-science dark ages of medicine group. And you can see here in the headlines, just like Jamie Reid said, this social contagion swept across America and it's starting to slow down now.

Here's a headline from just a handful of months ago. We have number of young adults identifying as transgender plunges by nearly half in two years. So it almost seems like the wave has crested and we're seeing a different conversation here. And isn't it funny, it's tied to these hospitals and these surgeons that are fearing for their licenses and fearing for lawsuits against them. That seems to be slowing the social contagion down. Well, that and taking the groomers outside of the public schools, like, you know, removing that, you know, attack on your children's psyche as you were making kindergartners question their own genders. I mean, boy, we're coming out of some real insanity. It's a brother of first year. And you can see, look how quickly it changes, right? It was totally socialized, as was so well stated in that testimony.