Monday Miscellany, 2/9/26

Doctors who trans minors found guilty of malpractice. The end of mass market paperbacks. And designer babies via IVF.

Doctors Who Trans Minors Found Guilty of Malpractice

Last summer, I said this in a blog post about physicians who do sex-change treatments on minors: “Some malpractice suits against doctors who sterilized and mutilated children would go a long way to ending these practices once and for all.” That has started to happen.

A jury in New York state has awarded a 22-year-old girl $2 million in a malpractice judgment against her psychologist who recommended “gender transition” and a plastic surgeon who gave her a double mastectomy when she was 16.

Her mother resisted giving consent, but the two doctors manipulated her by saying that if she didn’t, her daughter would likely commit suicide (“Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”), an emotional blackmail that has been thoroughly discredited.

Later, when the gender dysphoria faded, as it does 80% of the time, the girl no longer wanted to be a boy, but the doctors had permanently mutilated her. The court agreed that the doctors rushed the girl into this treatment, without considering the other psychological factors in her distress.

This is the first malpractice finding against doctors for their “gender re-assignment” treatments for minors. It will not be the last. Some 27 similar lawsuits have already been filed. The monetary win for “de-transitioners” will encourage many more. Some 1,000 children have been “transitioned” every year

Another promising sign is that United States medical associations, which used to be all-in for gender reassignment for children and were cited as authorities to justify the practice, are changing their tune. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) has just come out with a statement urging its members not to perform gender-reassignment surgery on minors.

And the biggest offender, the American Medical Association (AMA), has toned down its previously positive advice. “The evidence for gender-affirming surgical intervention in minors is insufficient for us to make a definitive statement,” says the new the AMA statement, while also saying that it “agrees” with the ASPS “that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.” Actually, there is lots of evidence–including massive European studies that the plastic surgeons drew on–that these “interventions” are bad medicine.

Once malpractice insurance premiums shoot up–or are denied altogether–for doctors who sterilize and mutilate children, the treatments will come to a quick stop. They will fade into medical history like bloodletting, lobotomies, eugenic hysterectomies, opium tonics for children, medical experimentation on black people, and other “how-could-they-have-thought-that-was- right” practices.

The End of Mass Market Paperbacks

The publishing industry is phasing out mass market paperbacks, those small, cheaply printed editions with the attention-grabbing covers sold at newsstands, drug stores, and other retailers that weren’t bookstores.

“Trade paperbacks,” the size of hard-bound books but with a paper cover, will still be available. But not the inexpensive 4.25” × 6.87” titles, some of which sold in the millions.

From the late 1960s through the mid 1990s, the mass market paperback was the leading format in the publishing industry. According to Publishers Weekly, in 1979, mass market paperbacks sold 387 million copies, with hardcovers selling 82 million and trade paperbacks selling 59 million. But by 2004, that number dropped to 131 million, and by 2024, it was only 21 million.

Now Readerlink, the nation’s largest book distributor, has announced that it will no longer carry mass market paperbacks, dooming the format. E-books and audio books have mostly taken their place. According to 2024 data from the Association of American Publishers, the market share of books sold was 37.2% for hardcovers, 33.8% for trade paperbacks, 1.3% for mass market paperbacks, 10.3% for e-books, and 11.3% for digital audio books.

The demise of the mass market paperback saddens me. Yes, lots of these were “trashy paperbacks,” as they were affectionally called. They were mostly “genre” books: science fiction, crime novels, romances, thrillers, westerns. Many of these were formulaic and predictable, simply ringing the changes on the genre’s conventions. But some of them were really good: Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, were only a few of the great Sci-Fi authors who made their careers with mass-market paperbacks. Some writers who ascended into the literary pantheon of hard-cover and trade books–Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler–got their start with novels with lurid covers sold in drug stores.

I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in its mass paperback edition. Actually, most of the books I read were in this format, since the small town I grew up in had no bookstores, but lots of paperback racks with titles I could afford with my Dairy Queen salary. By the time I grew up, publishers like Bantam and Penguin were selling mass market editions of classic literature, which became staples of my student and teaching years.

I wonder now what impact the end of paperbacks will have, not only on Sci-Fi and other genre fiction, but on the habit of reading. The Publishers Weekly article quotes former Bantam executive Esther Margolis: “I believe that mass market paperbacks democratized America. . . .Books and reading became popular in a way never before seen. I think how lucky I was to be part of its explosive growth.”

Designer Babies via IVF

In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) has crossed the line into eugenics. Already, IVF companies use genetic screening to test embryos for the likelihood of various diseases. Now a company has expanded that screening to allow customers to select an embryo on the basis of his or her future appearance, IQ, proclivity for sports, and other qualities of a “designer baby.” The embryos that don’t measure up to those consumer standards are “discarded” as medical waste.

Emily Mangiaracina of LifeSite News tells how it works:

Couples who sign up with Nucleus IVF+ are presented with an electronic “menu” of up to 20 embryos they have conceived, allowing them to view the sex of each baby, their anticipated hair and eye color, and predictions about the height and IQ of each as well as their risk for various diseases. The company notes that all these characteristics are only framed in terms of probabilities — they cannot make any guarantees. . . .

To shed light on the “why” behind the tool, company founder Kian Sadeghi described parents’ desires for their children: “They want us to, you know, play sports and they want us to go to the best school. They want us to be well educated. They want us to thrive. Life, I think, as a parent doesn’t just stop at ‘I want my child to be healthy,’” Sadeghi told CBS News in December. . . .

Once you pick your “best baby” (Nucleus’ own marketing phrase), the rest of your embryonic-stage babies are discarded like trash, as is standard in IVF practice. This itself is objectively evil and dystopian. “Pick your baby” then is an Orwellian euphemism for selecting the genetically “fit” and killing the rest of your offspring.

An article on the subject in Futurism points out the lack of evidence that genetic tests can predict traits such as height, much less complicated characteristics such as intelligence. So parents swept up by the hype of Nucleus IVF+ are basically picking their “best baby” and killing the rest of their offspring for nothing.