Editor’s note: This is the third podcast interview in a series on transgender phenomena, science, and the potential for medical malpractice lawsuits. Check out the first interview on rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the second interview on how mental health professionals divide parents and kids.
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.”
These troubled young people may find “the wrong practitioner,” one who is “focused on this transgender ideology,” he explains. “After 30 to 45 minutes in the first visit, they will diagnose and issue a prescription.”
For a girl, a doctor would prescribe testosterone “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 of estrogen.”
“Doing this, obviously, after only a 30-minute visit, means they have not ruled out any other potential avenue,” Miller notes. “Doing so obviously ignores the fact that maybe this child was suffering from depression, anxiety; maybe this child is just suffering from normal teenage angst that accompanies puberty.”
The practitioner “never presents psychotherapy as an option” in Miller’s cases, the lawyer notes. Instead, doctors rush patients “straight to the prescription of the drugs and then eventually on to surgeries.”
These medical interventions don’t just change a person to resemble someone of the opposite sex, they carry long-term side effects, the lawyer notes. Even when a person rejects a transgender identity after only receiving cross-sex hormones, that person will still need to receive injections of the hormones his or her body would naturally produce, because the intervention interrupted initial growth.
“You’re looking at lifelong medical issues that are going to require pharmaceutical drugs and therapies and treatments that just will never end,” Miller says.
Of a female detransitioner, he says, “She’s going to have bone-density issues because she went through a period of her development where her bones were just affected by a cross-sex hormone that just did not work with her body [in its natural development]. That creates long-term development issues that will have to be treated by specialists and medications. So, you’re looking at a lifelong medical bill, but then you’re also looking at consequences like … infertility.”
“How do you assign a value to the pain and the lost opportunity to have a child?” the lawyer asks.
“It’s a really difficult thing to predict,” and juries will have to settle the matter, he notes. “What is it worth to a person to have that taken from them? 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, lifelong injuries into a monetary figure that could compensate.”
When pressed to assign an approximate dollar figure, Miller says, “It would be in the millions, I think, for sure. I would say, based on our research, we expect a jury verdict to come back anywhere from $10 [million] to $20 million.”
Medical malpractice law varies from state to state. In some states, a detransitioner would have to bring a lawsuit one year after the harmful activity, and “often the detransitioner isn’t even aware of the deception that they were subjected to within this one-year period,” the lawyer says. For this and other reasons, legislatures will have to alter the law to enable detransitioners to sue for medical malpractice.
Typically, a malpractice plaintiff will have to “establish that 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,” Miller explains.
Yet, “there really is no agreed-upon standard of care nationwide or in any of the states,” the lawyer notes. The pro-transgender group the World Professional Association of Transgender Health has released “standards of care,” but WPATH admits that document is merely a set of guidelines for doctors to follow. Even WPATH encourages doctors to wait at least one year before medicalizing patients.
Miller says he relies on “the general standard of care … , which is to ‘first, do no harm,’ and second, do what’s in the patient’s best medical interest.” In most cases his firm takes up, the practitioners failed to satisfy either of those basic standards.
Miller says he was a commercial litigator before founding Campbell Miller Payne. He describes himself and his partners as “believers” seeking to help “the least of these,” as Jesus suggests in Matthew 25:40.
“When a person decides to pursue this course, they become transgender,” he explains. “Now, they’re already a societal outcast to some degree. But when they choose to detransition, now they’re leaving that already ostracized group. So, they’ve become the smallest and most ostracized of either group.”
He describes detransitioners as “the most alone” kind of people.
Miller says his firm is representing detransitioners such as Prisha Mosely and assisting with the case of Chloe Cole, perhaps the most well-known detransitioner.
When medical practitioners face malpractice suits, they often claim that putting minors on the experimental “treatments” immediately was necessary to prevent them from committing suicide.
“Our clients are living proof that’s just not the case,” Miller says.
When his firm represents a detransitioner, it only charges a contingency fee.
“The clients never pay for any of the cost expenses or any of the attorney fee time that’s put into the case until any award is received from the outcome of the case, whether by settlement or by verdict,” he explains.
Listen to the full interview below.
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