100s of NIH research grants have been summarily canceled over the past couple of weeks, on the grounds that they support DEI, trans issues, or are at Columbia. Now Trump is targeting mRNA studies, which scientists tell me could jeopardize research into new cancer treatments, for one, as well as the quest for and HIV vaccine. Many of these grants have nothing to do with DEI per se or are particularly focused on transgender people in particular. They seem to have been flagged simply because they have key words that have drawn the attention, and ire, of DOGE. I only have second-hand reports of what DOGE has been doing inside of the NIH and the NIAID. Today, a titan of biomedical research called me and was reduced to pleading over and over, “Why are they doing this?” as he watched in fear that his life’s work would be destroyed by the Trump administration.

LEAKED: Trans-Care Training Videos By Beleaguered Top Gender-Clinic Doctor, Part 1

I have obtained 12 hours of videos of top pediatric-gender-clinic physician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues, including her husband, providing training to mental-health providers on how to treat minors who have gender dysphoria or otherwise identify as transgender or nonbinary.

This is the first of 12 installments I will post during the coming weeks of these videos. Subscribe to my newsletter (link in bio) to receive all of them as I publish them.

A 19-year veteran of the pediatric gender medicine field and one of its leading physician-researchers and advocates, Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the medical director of the gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. According to figures she provided during this particular video, annual referrals to her clinic surged from just 25 in 2010 to 436 in 2022—following a similar pattern seen in clinics throughout the Western world.

The past six months have been challenging for Dr. Olson-Kennedy, to say the least.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health grant for a long-running research project concerning pediatric gender-transition treatment, one that has received over $10 million to date. In October, The New York Times reported that she has withheld null findings from a study of puberty blockers funded by this grant, doing so for political reasons. The grant is now the subject of a probe by congressional Republicans. In November, however, she asserted in a sworn deposition in a civil case that the Times had mischaracterized her words.

In December, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was sued by a former patient, Clementine Breen, who reported that the gender doctor prescribed her puberty blockers at age 12—on her first appointment, without a psychological assessment—and testosterone at age 13, and then referred her to receive a double mastectomy at age 14. Ms. Breen, now 20, has since detransitioned, reverting to presenting and identifying as a woman.

The Trump administration has unleashed an onslaught against the field of pediatric gender medicine, seeking to wipe it off the map. In recent weeks, the NIH has been canceling research grants related to transgender people, including those conducted with animal models. There is currently a preliminary injunction in place to block the president’s executive order that would freeze federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-transition interventions to those under age 19. Prior to the injunction, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s clinic had “paused” new cross-sex hormone treatments for youth, only to lift the pause a couple of weeks later.

It remains unclear whether the grant for which Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the top investigator has been canceled. But it is no longer listed on the NIH site where active grants are described.

I reached out to Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her co-principal investigators on the grant to ask about its status. I did not hear back.

Prior to the October Times article, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was perhaps best known by the general public for a previous leaked video in which she was giving a training in 2018 to mental health care providers on how to write referral letters for minors seeking gender-transition surgeries. In the video, she expresses exasperation with what she sees as hand wringing over whether natal girls will later regret having their breast removed during adolescence. (At least 1,000 such surgeries have been conducted annually in recent years.)

She says: “What we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasonable, logical decision. 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 recently reported that she was undergoing reconstructive surgery to provide herself with new breasts. However, it is very unlikely she will ever be able to breastfeed should she have children.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is also newly the president of USPATH, the U.S. branch of the medical-activist group the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH, which despite is name is largely a U.S.-based organization, has been besieged by damaging publicity over the past year, in particular after internal documents subpoenaed by Alabama’s attorney general revealed that its leadership was aware that the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine was weak and sought to paper over this fact.

12 hours of leaked Olson-Kennedy training videos

The 12-hour training in what is known as the gender-affirming care method for minors who identify as trans or nonbinary took place in late April 2024—a few weeks after Britain published the Cass Review, which found that this medical field is based on “remarkably weak evidence.” The training was led by Dr. Olson-Kennedy; her husband, Aydin Olson-Kennedy, who has a doctorate in social work and is a transgender man; and licensed clinical social worker Darlene Tando.

I obtained the videos a few months ago.

The training videos are a window into not just the methods of these individuals, but their overall attitudes about gender dysphoria and transgender and nonbinary identification in children. A prevailing attitude they share is one of indignation and irritation with a medical system that demands that children betray a substantial level of distress before they are granted gender-transition medications. Overall, these three favor less gatekeeping and less pathologizing of the mental states and internal lives of the children in their care. If a gender-incongruent child arrives in their care absent any particular distress about their identification as the opposite sex, they believe that that child should be granted the opportunity to medically transition by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones if the family wishes.

I have edited the videos to snip or crop out images that would identify the participants in the training, whether because of Zoom-chat questions that pop up in the right-hand corner of the screen, or moments when a matrix of the participants is visible. You can watch the video at the beginning of this Substack. Otherwise, I wrote a summary below: LINK:
LEAKED: Trans-Care Training Videos By Beleaguered Top Gender-Clinic Doctor, Part 1
benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-trans…
I am publishing 12 hours of videos of Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and colleagues in which they train mental-health providers on treating children who have gender dysphoria or otherwise identify as trans.

Subscribe to my newsletter to receive all the videos as I publish them.

Research indicates that even after undergoing lengthy testosterone suppression and estrogen treatment, natal males who identify as female hold a competitive advantage in women’s sports. This is not just about height. It’s about muscle strength, shoulder and hand size, oxygen processing, etc.

And there are teenage boys who can bear Katie Ledecky, one of the most unbeatable long-distance swimmers in history. *beat Katie

The difference between the trans sports question and past battles over interracial and same-sex marriage is that there was never any rational scientific support for opposition to those rights. But research does indicate that trans women maintain a competitive advantage in women’s sports. @mattyglesias @drvolts See:

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1880698617482068269

$544,000-a-Year, Newly Nonbinary @ACLU Executive Makes Incorrect Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine: Will This Impact Landmark Supreme Court Case?

🧵👇I report for the @NewYorkSun: Hired in 2019 as the ACLU’s first DEI chief, AJ Hikes has also emerged at the center of a labor-rights case against the nonprofit that deemed it illegally fired a staffer on unsubstantiated claims of racism. GIFT LINK: $544,000-a-Year, Nonbinary ACLU Executive Makes Incorrect Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine: Will This Impact Landmark Supreme Court Case?
nysun.com/article/544000…
Hired in 2019 as the ACLU’s first DEI chief, AJ Hikes has also emerged at the center of a labor-rights case against the nonprofit that deemed it illegally fired a staffer on unsubstantiated claims of racism.

How the NIH cuts would decimate pediatrics research at UNC and likely undermine the hospital system:
1/2

Leaked: LGBTQ Groups' Memo On Combatting Trump's Attack On Pediatric Gender Medicine

🧵👇I report: The secret memo, which is meant to help backers of pediatric gender medicine fight for the field in the court of public opinion, discourages focusing on the quality of the related scientific evidence. Leaked: LGBTQ Groups' Memo On Combatting Trump's Attack On Pediatric Gender Medicine

The secret memo, which is meant to help backers of pediatric gender medicine fight for the field in the court of public opinion, discourages focusing on the quality of the related scientific evidence.benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-lgbtq…

A lot of people are portraying USAID as some sort of bastion of looney DEI excesses. Let’s take a look at what the sudden arresting of their operation is doing to global health. Please read the thread (my thread, not Ryan James’):

https://twitter.com/ryangirdusky/status/1886481232566890716

Preventing malaria:

NEWS: The following words are officially cause for a federal grant to be rejected, according to @DarbySaxbe, a professor at @USC, who learned this from a program officer at the National Science Foundation.

“This is a crisis for academic freedom & science,” said Dr. Saxbe.


Here is a decision tree of what happens if a grant proposal has any of these words:

The pediatric gender clinic in Rhode Island run by Jason Rafferty has scrubbed its web presence. Rafferty is the sole author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on the gender-affirming care method and has been sued along with the AAP by a detransitioner. He published the statement when he was still a resident. The AAP Files: Inside Feud Within American Academy of Pediatrics, Torn Over Transgender Issues, About Group’s Decision To Hold Meeting in ‘Anti-LGBTQ’ Florida of Ron DeSantis

nysun.com/article/the-aa…

NEWS: CDC site scrubs HIV content following Trump DEI policies

The federal health agency began removing all content related to gender identity on Friday, I report for @NBCNews with @BerkelyJr.

HIV experts told us they are concerned that Trump's crackdowns could decimate the CDC's vital HIV prevention efforts, given that focusing on disparities related to race, sex and gender identity is fundamental to addressing the epidemic. nbcnews.com/health/health-…

NEWS: New Research Raises More Doubts About Safety and Benefits of Gender Transition Treatments for Minors
🧵👇I report: The most rigorous academic analysis to date of the research backing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as treatments for gender-related distress in young people has found it has produced ‘very uncertain’ evidence. —@NewYorkSun LINK: New Research Raises More Doubts About Safety and Benefits of Gender Transition Treatments for Minors, I report for The @NewYorkSun.
nysun.com/article/new-re…

NEWS: Trump Signs Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government”
🧵👇I report: The sweeping order, which defines sex as binary and fixed and seeks to exclude biological males from women's prisons and rape shelters, will inevitably be challenged by multiple lawsuits. LINK: Trump Signs Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government”

The sweeping order, which defines sex as binary and fixed and seeks to exclude biological males from women's prisons and rape shelters, will inevitably be challenged by multiple lawsuits.benryan.substack.com/p/trump-signs-…

Trump says: “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to social engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

And: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

There was enthusiastic applause in the rotunda. In short, Trump has taken aim at DEI.

Trump to issue raft of transgender-related executive orders on day 1

For @TheFP, @EmilyYoffe reports that these executive orders include:
▶️The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female.
▶️All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.
Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination.
▶️“Woman” means an “adult human female.”
▶️The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.
▶️The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded “transition” for male prisoners.
▶️The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of “preferred pronouns” and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.
▶️This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools. thefp.com/p/trumps-day-o…

Natacha calls the new Johanna Olson-Kennedy paper regarding 315 gender dysphoric 12-20 year olds who received cross-sex hormones for 2 years a "stake through the heart of the Cass Review." I have yet to read the paper in depth, but do take a look at the 🧵👇for some thoughts. Take a look at the changes in psychological well being, social satisfaction, negative social perception, self-efficacy, negative social perception, and negative affect after these youth were on cross-sex hormones for 24 months. Notice how slight the improvements were. Notice how some people's psychological well-being worsened.

The major and dramatic improvements were in the first plot, which shows appearance congruence (AC). This is unsurprising, since the central purpose of taking cross-sex hormones is to develop secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex to bring the body in line with gender identity. But even if that shift is associated with improvements in the other domains, the change in those other domains is quite minor.

Keep in mind how often we are told that after youth start these hormones, they improve dramatically. These data simply do not show a dramatic shift.

And because this study, which we've seen before (see: Chen et al 2023), quite famously has no control group of any kind, there is no way to know whether these slight improvements, or lack of deterioration on average, can be attributed to the hormones, to psychotherapy the youth were perhaps also getting, or reversion to the mean.

Keep in mind that the Chen et al paper was indeed factored into the Cass Review. It was considered as a part of the University of York systematic literature review that concluded: "There is a lack of high-­ quality research assessing the use of hormones in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. Moderate-quality evidence suggests mental health may be improved during treatment, but robust study is still required. For other outcomes, no conclusions can be drawn. More recent studies published since April 2022 until January 2024 [this includes Chen et al] also support the conclusions of this review."

Also note that despite the fact that 2 years have passed since the Chen et al paper was published, this new study regarding the same cohort also only provides 2 years of data. We still don't have more follow-up data on these youth.

Why is that?

Keep in mind that Olson-Kennedy is the same doctor who told the NYT that she was withholding publishing her puberty blocker study that reached null findings for political reasons. (Also note that she has since denied under oath that she said this and asserted that the study was delayed from publication for other reasons."

Most Americans Don't Support Top Trans-Activist Goals, NYT Poll Finds
🧵👇I report: A Times opinion poll found that the majority of Democrats think women's sports should be restricted by to sex, not gender identity, and that minors shouldn't have access to transition drugs. LINK: Most Americans Don't Support Top Trans-Activist Goals, NYT Poll Finds

A Times opinion poll found that the majority of Democrats think women's sports should be restricted according to sex, not gender identity, and that minors shouldn't have access to transition drugs.benryan.substack.com/p/most-america…

🧵The journal @JAMANetwork has published a pair of contrasting viewpoint essays on the case before SCOTUS over TN's ban on pediatric gender medicine, US v Skrmetti. One is by @GorinMoti and other experts in philosophy and medical ethics. The other by academic legal and public health experts.
Here is the link to the essay by the philosophers, which leans on the side of caution and shows deference to the recent systematic literature reviews in Europe that have cast doubt on the reliability of the evidence backing pediatric gender medicine. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

I’ve been reporting a story for a major outlet about a group that’s desperate to draw attention to a particular cause in hopes that the Biden admin will attend to it by Jan 20. But all but one of the advocates refused to speak to me because of my trans reporting. They prioritized blacklisting me—and not being associated with me—over their cause. I question their priorities and who they think they’re helping vs hurting by giving me the silent treatment. This is a very common phenomenon when I’m covering public health stories that overlap with activism and advocacy work. Not one of these people has ever confronted me directly to tell me why they have a problem with my reporting or what they want me to do differently. It’s all passive aggression. I wind up hearing confirmation of why they won’t speak to me through the grapevine.

In its response to Meta’s new polities GLAAD claims that the word “homosexuality” is an “outdated and a pathologizing way of referring to LGBTQ people.”

Several things:
1. No it is not.
2. How in the world did GLAAD come up with this ridiculous notion?
3. Homosexuality refers to the state of being gay, not to being transgender or queer, or even to being bisexual. Please stop conflating the letters of LGBTQ when it makes no sense to do so.
4. What exactly are we expected to say when we refer to the state of being gay, @GLAAD? We need nouns to get through life, people. The world would fall apart without them.

NEWS: 1 in 1,000 Privately Insured 17-Year-Olds Were Taking Cross-Sex Hormones Prior to State Bans
I report, link in 🧵👇: The authors of a new study analyzing 2018 to 2022 insurance claims data characterized such prescriptions as rare and said this rarity undermined arguments for bans of these interventions. LINK: 1 in 1,000 Privately Insured 17-Year-Olds Were Taking Cross-Sex Hormones Prior to State Bans

The authors of a new study analyzing 2018 to 2022 insurance claims data characterized such prescriptions as rare and said this rarity undermined arguments for bans of these interventions.benryan.substack.com/p/1-in-1000-pr…