Detransitioner Sues Doctor Who Hid Taxpayer-Funded Study Results, ‘Despicable, failed experiment’

The walls are closing in on perhaps the most influential youth gender-transition physician in America after she admitted hiding the results of her federally funded study that failed to find mental health improvements from so-called gender affirming care, contradicting her prior characterization of the study’s population to explain the results.

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles pediatrician and president-elect of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, is the lead defendant in a new lawsuit by UCLA student Kaya Clementine Breen, a seven-year patient who detransitioned and can reportedly back her claims using Olson-Kennedy’s patient notes on her.

One of Breen’s lawyers, Jordan Campbell, told Just the News Monday night that he wouldn’t share those notes without Breen’s approval, which was unlikely to happen the same day.

Six GOP senators joined House Oversight Committee Republicans last week in demanding the National Institutes of Health turn over information on Olson-Kennedy’s two-year study that started in 2015, which helped create a false medical consensus on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions for gender-confused youth.

“This case is about a team of purported health care providers who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health struggles and suffering from multiple instances of sexual abuse should be prescribed a series of life-altering” drugs starting at age 12 and breast removal at 14, Breen’s suit states.

Also according to the suit, the sexual abuse starting at 6 or 7 may be related to her “anxiety, depression, presumed autism, and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder,” which Breen credits to “a severely autistic brother, whose autism caused him to act out violently and made him highly volatile, creating a difficult home environment,” none of which she said the defendants explored.

“This so-called ‘treatment’ of Clementine by her providers represents a despicable, failed medical experiment and a knowing, deliberate, and gross breach of the standard of care that was substantially certain to cause serious harm,” she said. Breen’s lawyers include Charles LiMandri, who represents another California detransitioner.

The suit details allegations that Olson-Kennedy and fellow defendants CHLA, UC San Francisco’s St. Francis Memorial Hospital, surgeon Scott Mosser and his Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco, and therapist Susan Landon “made numerous material misrepresentations” to get Breen’s parents to go along with recommended care.

They include that blockers were “completely reversible” – a claim that divides the Biden administration – and Breen would kill herself if subsequently denied testosterone. She alleged Mosser never discussed the recommendation letters from Olson-Kennedy and Landon with Breen or even meet her before her surgery.

ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio admitted to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last week, defending its challenge to Tennessee’s ban on youth gender affirming care, that it has no evidence the care reduces “completed suicide” but claimed “multiple … long-term, longitudinal studies” show reduced “suicidality,” or thoughts of suicide. 

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Leor Sapir, who specializes in the science of the treatment, said activists often “exploit public ignorance about the difference between” suicidality and suicide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2022 one completed suicide for every 269 people who “seriously thought” about it and 33 attempts.

Strangio’s admission undermined Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s statement to Justice Sonia Sotomayor minutes earlier that transgender youth have “striking” suicide rates, though Prelogar also pivoted back to “reduced suicidal ideation and suicide attempts” when explaining the “significant health benefits” of gender affirming care. 

A 2017 endocrinology safety review by the Food and Drug Administration found the opposite, however. Leaked conversations of members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health – the parent of Olson-Kennedy’s USPATH, where she goes by “Jo” – shared stories of serious and even lethal side effects for young patients or colleagues.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is a rare mainstream American medical organization that has not thrown its full weight behind youth gender affirming care, warning of “considerable uncertainty” on the interventions and a “low quality/low certainty” evidence base.

While early European leaders in hormonal and surgical interventions for gender-confused youth have sharply pulled back in recent years, drawing a strong contrast with America’s laissez-faire practice, Switzerland has become a continental refuge for youth with resistant parents.

Its Federal Supreme Court refused to overturn criminal charges against a couple if they refuse to turn over their “daughter’s identity documents so her legally recorded sex could be changed,” Alliance Defending Freedom International, which is representing the anonymous parents, said Saturday. (The Daily Wire said the Nov. 6 ruling was embargoed for a month.)

The high court said the federal legislature would have to change the gender “self-determination” law, but ADFI claims the country’s constitution, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and European Convention on Human Rights protect the “child’s best interest” and override the statute. The law firm is considering a European Court of Human Rights appeal.

The Alpine state removed the girl from her parents last year after they refused to give her puberty blockers and her school reported them to authorities for refusing to socially transition her, with billionaire X owner Elon Musk amplifying worldwide attention. Like Breen, the girl’s mental health problems influenced her gender confusion at age 13, her parents say.

Defendants didn’t respond to Just the News queries Monday except for the Gender Confirmation Center, which said Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act considerations prohibit it from “comment on specific protected health information or pending litigation.”

It elaborated in a written statement that “we have continually refined our systems to prioritize patient safety, even when this occasionally introduces additional barriers to accessing care.

“Our robust processes and protocols are designed to ensure that patients navigating our services fully understand the implications of the gender-affirming procedures they may choose to undergo as part of their transition,” the statement says. “We regularly hear from former patients sharing updates about the overwhelmingly positive impact these surgeries have had on their lives – messages that continue to arrive many years after their procedures.”

Breen, who formerly went by Finn Paul, portrayed herself as “fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging” care by the defendants, who allegedly ignored her serious mental health problems and “lengthy history of mental health issues” in her family.

She started experiencing gender distress at 11 or 12, “likely due at least in part to the sexual abuse she experienced as a young child.” She told her then-school counselor “life would be easier if she were a boy” and the counselor immediately affirmed her identity and told her parents to do the same, the suit says.

Breen’s parents took the 12-year-old to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at CHLA, where Olson-Kennedy, the director, separated the girl from her parents, the suit says.

Olson-Kennedy, “after mere minutes,” diagnosed her with “gender dysphoria and recommended surgical implantation of puberty blockers” based on a “handful of platitudinal statements” – such as “I mostly have boy friends” and “I like boy things” – and no mental health assessment, Breen claims. 

This was despite gender confusion that “had only recently emerged just a couple of months prior,” with no discussion of the emotional distress that accompanies female puberty, especially sexual assault victims, the suit says: “These are very basic components of psychotherapy for young adolescent girls.”

The physician’s records don’t show Olson-Kennedy ordering another bone density scan in her seven years of treatment after the scan on Breen’s first visit, despite the known risks of blockers on adolescent bone density, “which alone would be malpractice,” according to Breen.

Olson-Kennedy was already recommending testosterone by the third visit based on the girl’s statement that boys in class were going through puberty, to “keep you on track,” and gave her parents a consent form, the suit says.

Reprinted with permission from Just The News by Greg Piper.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.