Jim Minnery: Victory in court, momentum in culture and why one verdict changes everything

By JIM MINNERY

Fox Varian will never breastfeed the children she hopes to have one day.

At 16, doctors convinced her she was a boy and removed her breasts. Last week, a New York jury handed her $2 million and called it what it was: malpractice.

The tide is turning.

This verdict sends a chilling message to every activist doctor, healthcare provider and hospital profiting from the mutilation of children. For years, these practitioners hid behind manufactured consensus, insisting that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries were “necessary”—or worse, “lifesaving”—for confused teenagers.

Now a jury has stripped away that pretense. What they did to Varian was not medicine. It was harm dressed as treatment, sold to desperate parents with the cruelest lie imaginable: transition your child or bury them.

Chloe Cole, who Alaska Family Council has been privileged to bring up to the Great Land twiceto address this “gender-denying” medical fraud, knows that lie. The detransitioner who underwent similar procedures as a teenager appeared on Fox News after Varian’s verdict. She didn’t celebrate.

“Two million dollars is not nearly enough to compensate for the damages these doctors have done to my generation,” Cole said. “I think it would only be right if every single doctor and clinic involved in this has their wallets completely drained, and they’re all thrown in prison with the keys thrown out.” 

Alliance Defending Freedom has been fighting this battle for over a decade. The results are undeniable. The Trump administration started the year by issuing executive orders that protect women’s sports and reject the unlawful rewrite of Title IX.

That paved the way for the decisive victory in June. In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that states have the constitutional authority to protect children from these experimental procedures. Twenty-five states have now banned these interventions for minors. The highest court in the land confirmed that states have a compelling interest in shielding children from irreversible harm.

That legal victory is now reinforced by medical consensus. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), an organization representing over 11,000 physicians, officially disavowed sex-rejecting procedures for minors just this week. HHS leadership commended the organization for the decision. After reviewing the data, the ASPS found “insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.”

As Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD stated, “When the medical ethics textbooks of the future are written, they’ll look back on sex-rejecting procedures for minors the way we look back on lobotomies.” Our federal health agencies are once again championing biological truth rather than rubber-stamping radical ideology.

While Fox Varian won in court, somewhere in America another teenage girl is walking into a clinic, hearing the same script Varian heard, and making an appointment she will regret for the rest of her life. The damage continues. Children are still being pushed into these procedures.

We always knew this wasn’t medicine. Between 80 and 95 percent of children who experience gender confusion naturally resolve those feelings during puberty if left alone. But instead of letting children grow out of it, the system pushes them deeper in. Influencers convince impressionable girls and boys that normal discomfort means they were born in the wrong body. Schools secretly facilitate social transitions. Doctors affirm that manufactured crisis of identity, rushing children toward irreversible hormones and surgeries.

Varian’s $2 million is a warning shot. It proves doctors who rushed children into irreversible harm can be held accountable. It proves juries recognize malpractice when they see the evidence. But one verdict does not close the clinics still operating or stop the procedures scheduled for tomorrow.

Here in the Great Land, Alaska Family Council has been at the tip of the spear in the medical arena for two years fighting to ensure minors are not experimented on with dangerous procedures that cause lifelong complications. Despite efforts by Alaska State House member Jamie Allard to pass legislation holding practitioners accountable, the Democrat-led chamber, given its’ power by the likes of Republicans Chuck Kopp and Louise Stutes, has sat on its’ hands.

Encouragingly, the Alaska State Medical Board has voted unanimously two different times to address this matter. Once in March of 2025 recommending that the Alaska State Legislature pass legislation to protect minors from gender-denying care. But, because Kopp and Stutes gave power to the Democrats in the House and multiple Republican Senators in that Chamber, including Gary Stevens, Cathy Giessel, Kelly Merrick and Bert Stedman did the same, the Legislature did nothing.

In August of 2025, because the Legislature refused to act, the Alaska State Medical Board proposed actual regulatory language to the Department of Law. Again, unanimously. This issue now waits for Governor Dunleavy to ask the Attorney General to release those regulations, after they are modified as needed, back to the Board where there will be public comments before a final vote.

The tide is turning. States are passing protective laws. Courts are ruling in our favor. The Trump administration is cutting funding. But the fight is far from over. Too many children are still at risk. We cannot let up.

Jim Minnery is president of Alaska Family Council.