Dozens of Stories Covered a Detransitioner Lawsuit. The Response Hasn’t Been Covered At All.
Kaiser Permanente responded to lawsuits by Chloe Cole and Kayla Lovdahl alleging medical malpractice by saying the suits have no merit. Kaiser asked the court to dismiss them and force Cole and Lovdahl to pay their costs.
by Evan Urquhart
In September, Kaiser Permanente filed an answer the medical malpractice lawsuit of Chloe Cole, asking the court to dismiss the frivolous suit on multiple grounds. Kaiser’s attorneys claim the suit “fails to state facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action,” that Cole and her parents consented to treatment, in consultation with “a multidisciplinary team of trained and licensed medical professionals,” that Cole “waived any right to recover damages” through that consent, and that Kaiser fully “complied with all applicable regulations, code provisions, laws, and standards of care.”
screenshot from Kaiser Permanente’s Answer to the Complaint by Chloe Brockman a/k/a Chloe Cole
Kaiser also filed an almost identical answer to a second complaint by detransitioner Kayla Lovdahl, who, like Cole, was represented by conservative activist lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, and who, like Cole, alleged she was entitled to damages after consenting to gender-affirming care with Kaiser docs. In both filings Kaiser asked the court not only to dismiss the suits but to order the petitioners to pay all costs (having the petitioner pay costs for both sides is a common penalty to discourage against frivolous lawsuits).
screenshot from Kaiser Permanente’s Answer to the Complaint by Chloe Brockman a/k/a Chloe Cole
The story of Cole and Lovdahl filing the suits was covered in dozens of stories, largely in the right wing press. The feeding frenzy response to Cole’s initial announcement of the suit in November of last year was chronicled in a timeline by Assigned Media, but coverage of Cole and Lovdahl’s suits continued for months. In addition to right wing media, the lawsuits were covered by the San Francisco Chronicle in February, and the LA Times in March. Mention of Cole’s suit against Kaiser even appeared in a letter to the editor published by the Bismark Tribune just hours ago.
Meanwhile, the response by Kaiser has seen no coverage whatsoever. Assigned, which monitors news coverage rather than court filings, was alerted to it by a reader and could find no evidence that any other reporter, at any other outlet, had written a word documenting Kaiser’s response.
When is a lawsuit not really a lawsuit? There’s been a growing pattern of papers that are filed in a court of law by conservative legal advocacy groups that read like a parable and contain very few references to the actual law. In place of legal claims, which can be technical, dense, and hard for a layperson to follow, this genre of lawsuit has the detail and flavor of a story, one with a simple moral lesson that hews closely to anti-trans talking points. This story-like court filing material then becomes dozens of news-like stories when it enters the right-wing media sphere. These news-like stories are eerily alike, quoting liberally from the court filings in a narrative form. It’s almost as if the real purpose of the suits is to be turned into news stories, and there’s no intent to make legal claims there at all.
The mainstream media, and even this website, struggles to cover this junk. They’re flimsy and unlike normal suits, but to say that plainly is to advance a legal opinion, and journalists aren’t supposed to do that. There are likely legal experts who’d be willing to weigh in on the potential merits of weird meandering story barely dressed up in the ill-fitting clothes of a legal filing, but outlets with ample connections to such experts don’t typically go to the trouble for stories that are viewed as trifling right-wing gawk-fests. This means the mainstream media (and Assigned Media) coverage of these suits becomes a watered down version of the stories on the right, a retelling of the allegations with no signal to the reader of how strange these suits are, or how unlikely they seem to succeed.
Of course, you never know what a judge might rule. Perhaps the suit against Kaiser has more merit than it seems. No one wants to outright say that it does not, and risk being embarrassed if a judge disagrees.
One suit of this type, seeking to force a transgender girl out of her sorority, was dismissed in August by a judge whose dismissal lectured the plaintiff’s lawyers to include fewer irrelevant details, and more references to the actual law, if they choose to file again. These lawsuits brought against Kaiser seem if anything more flimsy, less grounded in law. They make no claims that the doctors at Kaiser acted counter to the standards of care for gender dysphoric youth in treating Cole or Lovdahl. They don’t even claim Cole or Lovdahl were misdiagnosed.
These lawsuits were never really intended as malpractice suits at all. They articulate no legal justification for treating gender-affirming care differently, or even any acknowledgement that this is what they’re proposing to do. That’s because the real audience isn’t the court. It’s the conservative base, mediated through an unethical and shoddy conservative press, neither of whom seem to know or care what a normal malpractice suit might contain.