Jeff Miller / UW-Madison
The doctors from UW Hospitals and Clinics have denied the claims against them.
When Meredith, a Madison mother of two, read news of a medical malpractice lawsuit against UW doctors for providing gender-affirming care, she was “aghast.”
“What was alleged in the lawsuit is the complete opposite of what my family and I have experienced with this clinic and with these providers, especially Dr. Gast,” says Meredith, who requested that her last name not be used to protect the identity of her transgender teenager.
“These are excellent providers who have done a really good job informing us about the potential risks and benefits of treatment,” she adds. “They have not pressured us in any way to pursue treatment.”
In a lawsuit filed Nov. 1 in Dane County Court, a 23-year-old Illinois woman alleges that two UW surgeons operated on her “after a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria” and without proper informed consent. (Through the process of informed consent, patients authorize treatment after being provided information about the risks, benefits and alternatives from their health providers.) The complaint notes that Dr. Jay Lick performed a hysterectomy on the patient when she was 19, and Dr. Katherine Gast performed a double mastectomy on the woman when she was 21.
According to the complaint the plaintiff, who suffers from depression and anxiety and has a history of childhood sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder, has been “left barren and breastless, forced to live the remainder of her life in a sterile physical state that her trusted medical professionals advocated for.”
The complaint further alleges that, as a Jewish woman, the plaintiff “mourns that she will never be able to naturally conceive a large family, as expected in her culture.”
Though the lawsuit originally named the plaintiff, her attorneys subsequently petitioned the court to redact her name from the record. The complaint now lists her as “Jane Doe.”
In a Dec. 19 answer to the complaint, attorneys from the Wisconsin Department of Justice, who are representing the UW doctors, denied all of the woman’s claims. The attorneys also note in the filing that they have not yet received a signed authorization to access the plaintiff’s medical information.
Attorneys for the Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund, named as defendants along with the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Authority, denied all claims in a Dec. 21 filing.
Also on Dec. 21, the Authority asked the court to dismiss it from the lawsuit. Its motion argues that the Authority can’t be held liable for medical negligence by Lick or Gast because, under Wisconsin state law, “no member of the faculty or academic staff of the University of Wisconsin System, acting within the scope of his or her employment, may be considered, for liability purposes, as an agent of the authority.”
Circuit Court Judge Nia Trammell has scheduled a Jan. 22 status conference on the case.
Medical malpractice is a highly specialized area of law. The cases are complex, involving knowledge of medicine and the rules of informed consent. They are also expensive to pursue and are usually done on a contingent-fee basis, which means lawyers don’t get paid unless they win the case. Statutory caps on damage awards can also discourage attorneys from pursuing cases. Damages against doctors employed by the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics are limited to $250,000.
The lead plaintiff attorney on the case against the UW doctors is Daniel Cragg, a partner with Eckland & Blando, a law firm in Minneapolis. Though transgender issues are now a flashpoint in the culture wars, and conservative lawmakers across the country are attempting to restrict access to gender-affirming care, Cragg told the Wisconsin State Journal in a Nov. 3 article that his firm is “not doing this as a (public relations) maneuver like a lot of the destransitioner cases are. This is a straight personal injury (medical malpractice) case.”
Cragg’s law firm lists 15 practice areas on its website, including commercial litigation, government contracts, competition, administrative law and admiralty and maritime law. Medical malpractice is not on the list.
Isthmus emailed and phoned Cragg requesting an interview for this story but he did not respond.
According to Cragg’s biography on the firm’s website, he is a litigator with a focus on “commercial litigation, employer defense, factoring and asset based lending, admiralty and maritime law, and procedurally complex cases, including cases against the government.”
In 2022, Eckland & Blando created the “Detransition Network,” described on the website as an “informal association of legal and medical professionals who are dedicated to ending the harms caused by medical malpractice and the failure to obtain informed consent in the provision of ‘gender-affirming care.’ We want to provide legal help to detransitioners.”
The network also seeks out clients on Reddit. “Were you harmed by gender-affirming treatment as a minor?” a posting from about a year ago reads. “The Detransition Network wants to hear your story. We are a group of attorneys that want to help detransitioners pursue justice against the medical professionals that failed them. Contact us via www.detransitionnetwork.com for a free legal consultation.”
Cragg also posted a Jan. 30 article to Substack titled, “How informed consent laws can protect kids with gender dysphoria.” He writes that the number of minor children seeking gender-affirming care has “exponentially increased” in recent years and that by middle school kids have the option to medically transition — “which can include puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions such as voice surgeries, genital reconstruction surgeries, and mastectomies.”
Cragg argues in his article that a different standard of “informed consent” for gender-affirming care — where “parents are asked: ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or an alive son?’” — results in cases where parents are pressured into decisions and where patients later regret their transition treatments.
Survey data compiled by Reuters and the health technology company Komodo Health found that diagnoses of gender dysphoria among youth nearly tripled from 2017 (15,000 cases) to 2021 (42,000 cases). The use of hormone therapy and puberty blockers also went up, but surgeries were uncommon.
The survey draws on data that includes about 40 million patients annually, ages 6 through 17, and comprises health insurance claims that document diagnoses and procedures administered by U.S. clinicians and facilities.
How common is regret over transitioning? In a recent Isthmus cover story on gender-affirming care, Phoebe Petrovic of Wisconsin Watch cites a major study, published in 2022 in the journal Pediatrics, that found that five years after their social transition, 94 percent of study participants were still living as either trans girls or trans boys.
Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the Dallas-based Institute for Policy Innovation, a right-leaning free-market think tank, estimates in an October opinion piece for the Hill that there are about 10 pending lawsuits targeting doctors and hospitals over transgender care.
In his column Matthews expresses alarm over the growing number of diagnoses for gender dysphoria, and how the “left has aggressively embraced transgender care for children, including surgeries, claiming those actions are based on ‘medical reasons.’”
He says that “a growing number of detransitioner lawsuits are going to test these claims and practices” because “many patients believe they were encouraged to take the gender-affirming medicalization route without being fully informed of all the life-long implications and negative consequences.”
Meredith, the mother of the trans teenager, says that her family has not been pressured at all to pursue medical interventions by their UW doctors. “The message we got was, ‘think about all this information and we will be here for you when you’re ready.’”
Her son has been using this time to also work on his physical and mental health. “He was vaping and was told he had to stop vaping. And he did, and has stuck to that for almost a year.
“I know what is required to receive gender-affirming care,” she adds, “and it is in fact more rigorous in terms of consent than most other forms of medical care.”
She says she fears backlash from these kinds of lawsuits. “I am speaking out because I know that even a meritless lawsuit can create political cover to deny really important healthcare not just to minors, but to adults.”
