Justice is served. A child psychiatrist fired from the University of Louisville some years ago for criticizing the irresponsible and harmful transgender “treatments” mania for minors has just received a $1.6 million settlement from his former employers.
Allan Josephson in 2019 argued that the medical industry was rushing too fast to give gender dysphoric kids cross-hormone “treatments” and mutilating transgender surgeries, when there was no long-term evidence that such so-called treatments were effective or safe. Josephson was one of the first doctors who lost his job for speaking out against the transgender craze in the medical world, but a court has now vindicated him by imposing a sizable settlement on the university that fired him.
Josephson told The Free Press how pleasantly astonished he was by the court’s decision. “I looked at my wife and I said, ‘This is amazing.’ We felt vindicated by the amount that we won.”
The psychiatrist had been speaking at a Heritage Foundation panel when he made the comments that inadvertently stirred up controversy. “Transgender ideology… is neglectful of the need for developing coping skills and problem-solving skills in children,” he said. “Of course you affirm the child and love the child, but you don't affirm a bad idea.”
He became the target of a snowballing campaign where multiple individuals, his colleagues, began searching for pretexts to accuse him of bad practice and anti-transgenderism. After the university refused to renew his contract in 2019, Josephson partnered with Alliance Defending Freedom.
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Josephson was an expert witness in more than one case involving gender dysphoria, had received an award from the American Psychiatric Association, and chaired the university’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology before he was fired, per The Free Press. His visit over half a dozen years ago to his university’s gender clinic convinced him that medical experts were so determined to rush children into transitioning that they were not actually treating the underlying mental illness.
Since Josephson’s firing, a sea change has taken place regarding transgender medicine in America. President Donald Trump was elected after promising to greatly restrict gender-affirming care for minors. During the 2024 campaign season the GOP spent at least $215 million on trans-themed television ads, the most famous of which targeted Kamala Harris’s stance on transgender issues with the slogan “She’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.” On the day of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order mandating that the federal government acknowledge “women are biologically female” and “men are biologically male.”
Josephson told The Free Press, “I'm a doctor who pursues the truth for his patients, so when Trump says there are two sexes—male and female—I’m encouraged by that.” So are the majority of Americans.
“I wanted it actually to go to court, because I thought that would be the final vindication,” Josephson explained. “The personal cost was so enormous. I'm getting older, so this came at a good time, and there was a good settlement.” A just and objective court decision — what a rarity that is now!
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