The court heard claims that a psychologist’s warnings about a girl’s mental state influenced a mother’s decision to consent to the surgery.
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—A mother told jurors last week that she consented to breast removal surgery for her teenage daughter out of fear the girl would take her own life.
Claire Deacon, mother of plaintiff Fox Varian, told the court on Jan. 15 that psychologist Dr. Kenneth Einhorn insisted her daughter was at risk of harming herself since she was a teenager with depression and gender dysphoria.
Varian is suing Einhorn, along with surgeon Dr. Simon Chin and their employers, for malpractice. The plaintiffs allege that the health care providers erred in approving and performing the breast removal, known as “top surgery,” to address her gender dysphoria, which is the feeling that one’s biology does not match their gender identity.
Varian’s attorneys have suggested that she actually had body dysmorphia, an irrational obsession with a flaw or part of one’s anatomy. They allege that the health care professionals did not give enough consideration to her host of other problems: depression, autism, social phobia, anxiety, and anorexia.
Deacon said she was never fully on board with the procedure and initially told Einhorn that “it was never gonna happen” if she had any say in the matter. This led to many “heated discussions” with the psychologist.
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said.
“I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
Eventually, Deacon said, she came to believe Einhorn’s assertion that her daughter would not be happy unless she lived as a male. She agreed to the surgery for her 16-year-old daughter, in what she described as “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision.
Deacon testified that, in front of her daughter, she put on a confident face about the procedure. But behind closed doors, it made her “physically ill.”
Just before the surgery, she waited until her daughter went to the operating room, then went into a bathroom to cry.
“I’ve apologized to her for not being stronger for her,” Deacon said at the hearing. Varian, now aged 22, no longer identifies as male.
Attorneys for the defendants claim that Varian, not Einhorn, was the driving force behind the surgery decision, while Chin testified that the young woman told him she had those thoughts for three to four years before the 2019 surgery, and that when she arrived for her consultation, she knew which kind of incision she wanted.
