Thread by @benryanwriter

BREAKING: Detransitioner Sues Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a Top Pediatric Gender Medicine Doctor, For Medical Negligence

🧵⬇️⬇️I report: Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the most prominent doctor yet to be sued by a detransitioner—for medical negligence after overseeing a mentally ill girl's gender-transition starting at 12 and mastectomy at 14. She recommended a hysterectomy at 17.

LINK: Detransitioner Sues Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a Top Pediatric Gender Medicine Doctor, For Medical Negligence

Dr. Olson-Kennedy, a leading @WPATH member is the most prominent doctor yet to be sued by a detransitioner.benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 The plaintiff suing Johanna Olson-Kennedy reports having suffered from severe, worsening mental illness while Dr. Olson-Kennedy oversaw her gender-transition treatment, including a double mastectomy at age 14. Now a college student, she recently detransitioned. benryan.substack.com/publish/posts/…

🧵 The detransitioner lawsuit accuses Dr. Olson-Kennedy of:
▶️Prescribing the plaintiff, then a newly-gender-questioning 12 year old, puberty blockers following a single cursory appointment and no assessment with a mental health professional;
▶️Coercing the girl’s wary parents into consenting to testosterone therapy by insisting their child, who had no history of suicidality, would kill herself without such irreversible treatment
▶️Failing to provide the family with proper informed consent.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 It was only after the girl started taking testosterone at age 13 and had her breasts surgically removed the following year that she actually became suicidal and tried to take her own life, according to the suit.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 The girl reportedly suffered increasingly severe psychosis, including auditory and visual hallucinations. Dr. Olson-Kennedy ultimately recommended a hysterectomy when the girl was 17. benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 An outspoken advocate for minors’ access to gender-transition treatment and surgery, Dr. Olson-Kennedy has a history of downplaying potential or certain fertility loss due to such interventions on minors and of minimizing the impact of any regret following top surgery. benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 Dr. Olson Kennedy is on record exaggerating the risk of suicide death among adolescents with gender dysphoria and making definitive claims—absent definitive supporting research—that these gender treatments and surgeries save children’s lives. benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 Kaya Breen, 20, who goes by her middle name, Clementine, filed suit on Thursday in Superior Court of the State of California in Los Angeles against Dr. Olson-Kennedy and two of her colleagues, including a surgeon and psychotherapist. benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 Ms. Breen, who was sexually abused around age 6 or 7, a history that her lawsuit asserts “was never explored, addressed, or discussed” by the defendants, has accused the team of medical negligence. Her suit, which was first reported by @JesseSingal in @TheEconomist on Friday, seeks damages and a jury trial.
economist.com/united-states/…
jessesingal.substack.com/p/read-my-stor…

🧵 Amid declining mental health, Ms. Breen received gender-transition-treatment from Dr. Olson-Kennedy throughout her adolescence—and at times, was under the care of the two other defendants as well. Having identified as male during this period and gone by the name Finn, Ms. Breen ultimately reverted to identifying and presenting as female by the end of her teens. She reports profoundly regretting the treatment—known as gender-affirming care—that she received. benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the medical director at The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the nation’s largest pediatric gender clinic, and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. She is an executive board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender-Health (WPATH) and president-elect of its U.S. branch, USPATH. @WPATH is a controversial quasi-activist-medical organization that is largely based in the United States and publishes widely referenced trans-care guidelines. She has reported prescribing cross-sex hormones to over 1,000 adolescents and young adults since 2006.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
Dr. Olson-Kennedy is married to a transgender man, Aydin Olson-Kennedy, who is a licensed clinical social worker, a WPATH member and also works in pediatric gender medicine.
benryan.substack.com/p/the-wpath-fi…
benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-wpath…

🧵 The public has actually already received a preview of Ms. Breen’s story. The Canadian anti-gender-transition-treatment activist known as @BillboardChris posted a video on X on Oct. 22 documenting a candid recent exchange between the two of them on the UCLA campus.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
“It totally messed my life up,” Ms. Breen told Billboard Chris of the gender-transition treatment she received.

But the lawsuit Ms. Breen was by that time preparing against Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues only became public on Friday.

🧵 Dr. Olson-Kennedy is perhaps most well known to pediatric gender medicine outsiders because of an undercover video taken in 2018 of a lecture she gave to mental health providers instructing them on how to write letters to help minors obtain insurance coverage for gender-transition interventions. During the lecture, she expressed evident exasperation with prevailing concerns that gender dysphoric minors who have a double mastectomy might later regret the operation.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
“What we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned, logical decision,” she said. “And here’s the other thing about chest surgery: If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

Ms. Breen, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s former patient who is suing her, has tried to go out and get breast reconstruction. But she told @BillboardChris that she has had a much harder time securing the surgery for that than she did when it came to her original mastectomy.

🧵 Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the leading investigator on a multifaceted, long-running $10 million National Institutes of Health study of the care and treatment of youth who identify as transgender.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
As @JesseSingal reported in The Atlantic in 2018, a 2017 paper indicated that the youngest patients receiving cross-sex hormones at Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s clinic during the years prior were 12 years old.

Also in 2017, Dr. Olson-Kennedy sought and received approval for her NIH-funded research to reduce the minimum age for prescribing cross-sex hormones to children from 13 to eight years old.

🧵 In a video of a 2015 lecture Dr. Olson-Kennedy gave, she said:
youtube.com/watch?v=pO8v--…
“Surgery, chest surgery for trans guys as minors, is critical. And it’s available! It’s not nearly as difficult as genital reconstruction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with sterilization. The difficulty of genital surgery is that it is surgical sterilization and people get super worked up about that. And that is the barrier that we have to overcome. And I think we’re going to. But chest surgery is not that.”
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

🧵 Dr. Olson-Kennedy has a long history of insisting that the treatments she provides are life saving and that providing them should be prioritized over preserving fertility. Natal males in particular are at substantial apparent risk of infertility if, as WPATH recommends, they receive puberty blockers soon after puberty’s onset followed by long-term estrogen treatment.

In this 2012 video, @NBC’s @HodaKotb said to Dr. Olson-Kennedy: “To me it seems ridiculous to have a kid at age 12, 13, 14 deciding whether they want to have biological children when they’re 20, 30 or 40.”

Dr. Olson-Kennedy immediately replied: “Well, they make the decision to kill themselves at 12 and 13. That’s a pretty powerful decision.”

“We take an oath: first do no harm,” Dr. Olson-Kennedy continued. “If doing nothing is doing harm, you have to do something.”

Ms. Breen’s lawsuit alleges that what Dr. Olson-Kennedy should have done in her case was nothing where gender treatments were concerned. Instead, the suit asserts, the doctor should have treated her underlying mental health problems.

“I don’t know how a child can consent to the loss of their fertility,” Ms. Breen told @BillboardChris in October. “Children can’t conceptualize that.”

🧵 Dr. Olson-Kennedy told ABC in 2011 of children with gender dysphoria: “These kids have a suicide rate that is astronomical compared to any other group.”
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
Two recent studies, one in England and the other in Finland, recently found that the suicide rate among gender-distressed minors is elevated compared with their age-matched peers; and yet suicide deaths among them are nevertheless rare.

In Wednesday’s oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court over Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment, ACLU litigator Chase Strangio, a trans man, said that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among children who identify as transgender.

What’s more, the Finnish study, which I covered for The New York Post and which no one during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments seemed to be aware of, is the only study to date to assess whether there is independent, statistically significant association between receiving gender-transition treatment and a difference in the suicide death rate among young people. The study authors found there was not.

🧵 Dr. Olson-Kennedy also has a history of doubting the value of the biopsychosocial assessments that WPATH recommends for minors before they receive gender-transition treatment or surgeries. She shares this in common with @UCSF child psychiatrist Jack Turban, who suggested in his recent book that the assessments were worthless and should be done away with.

There is, for example, a 2019 podcast interview that Dr. Olson-Kennedy gave to members of the controversial gender clinic Gender GP, which has provided gender-transition treatment to British minors via telemedicine from abroad. Marianne Oakes, the organization’s lead counselor, said in reference to guardrails around gender-transition treatment: “I feel the system is geared up to protect c-s people from making a mistake rather than actually caring for the trans people.”
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
To which Dr. Olson-Kennedy replied: “A hundred percent, absolutely.” She continued: “I always say what is there in that concern?…What does it mean to make a mistake? What does that mean? So we’re gong to accidentally make someone trans?” She attributed such concern about the potential harms of pediatric gender-transition treatment to what she called “c-s fragility.” And she said that these worries are what “drives people to create huge and unmanageable and often inaccessible assessment periods” for minors seeking gender-transition treatment.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy continued: “It never takes into account autonomy of humans—that let’s talk about what it would mean if we just let people move forward and we affirm and believe what they were telling us, right? At the end of the day, who is responsible for that? The person that made that decision.”

In Ms. Breen’s case, her lawsuit against Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues disagrees. It asserts that those adults were responsible for what became of Ms. Breen’s childhood and seeks to hold them accountable.

One of the comments on my reporting on the lawsuit against Johanna Olson-Kennedy: benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

Here is the legal complaint against Johanna Olson-Kennedy: drive.google.com/file/d/1gpg8qe…

I knew the Olson-Kennedy suit was coming down the pike when I wrote this. So it informed my reporting even though I was not allowed to speak publicly about the suit until today. nypost.com/2024/10/19/us-…

A response from a reader of my reporting on the lawsuit against Johanna Olson-Kennedy:
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…

Clementine Breen tells her story directly: