by Jeff Childers
The far-left Economist ran a surprisingly sane story yesterday under the deceptive, passive-voice headline, “America’s best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine is being sued.” It should have read, “former child patient sues America’s best-known gender doctor.” Hyphenated doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy is the Medical Director of the Center for Transyouth at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. She is also the president-elect of the United States Association for Transgender Health. Now, along with two other so-called “doctors,” Johanna is staring at a serious lawsuit from her former child patient.
The Economist called Johanna “among the most celebrated youth gender medicine clinicians in the world.” Celebrated is one way of putting it. She’s scooped up tens of millions in grants from the National Institutes of Health. The dashed doctor also coined the ugly quote that you’ve probably seen circulating online: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”
Johanna thinks she’s a pioneer. Current transgender guidelines strongly “suggest the importance of conducting a careful, in-depth assessment prior to starting a young person on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.” But the Economist explained that “Johanna has emerged as a critic of what she views as undue and unnecessary ‘gatekeeping.’”
And that trademark, the lack of ‘gatekeeping,’ making sure her patients are actually suffering from gender dysphoria before prescribing life-changing procedures, is exactly what Dr. Olson-Kennedy is now being sued for. You might recall Johanna from this story back in October:
Johanna was the lead researcher on a fabulously expensive, government-funded study (she got about $10 million dollars). But it didn’t turn out like she’d hoped. When her best efforts to wring a positive result from her study of kids on puberty drugs failed, she buried her own study.
Refusing to publish unfavorable results —after taking public money!— is the worst kind of academic abuse and widely considered unethical.
In one widely-circulated, secretly recorded presentation, Dr. Dash told other doctors that puberty blockers are as reversible as a haircut, toys, clothing style, a new name, and pronouns. She also said, “some surgeries are partially reversible,” presumably referring to her insane notion that “going and getting” breast augmentation “reverses” a double mastectomy.
Accepting for purposes of argument that puberty blockers and mastectomies are reversible (they aren’t), Johanna’s moronic argument still fails. Any child who transitions —involving their extended family, school, church, and social groups, and makes profound, life-altering decisions to undertake painful procedures rife with side effects ranging from inconvenient to deadly— that child faces inconceivable levels of psychological pressure to stay the course.
How is that “as reversible as a haircut?”
It is unimaginable how much strength of will and personality would be required for a hormone-addled child, who put herself, her parents, her family, and her friends through the pain and suffering of the first gender change, to destransition. After all that, who is possibly courageous enough to recognize her mistake and change back? That is why detransitioners usually don’t desist till their 20’s — after they’ve escaped their parent’s baleful influence.
Johanna is married to Aydin, a female-to-male transgender, licensed social worker, and trans activist.
I’m going to respectfully, and delicately, suggest Johanna probably suffers from her own mental health challenges.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy will never be accused of being an intellectual superstar. Listening to one of Dr. Olson’s lectures, one is most reminded of an over-excited woman in a bar after her third Cosmopolitan. Yet she is considered one of the “elite,” a trans “thought leader.” She somehow graduated from medical school, wrung millions in grants out of the U.S. government, became a large-hospital medical director, yet argues with the strength of a tipsy drunk.
CLIP: Johanna Olson-Kennedy tries to make some kind of argument (1:00).
The lawsuit’s plaintiff, Clementine Breen, 20, first saw Dr. Olson-Kennedy when she was 12. After a short, 30-minute intake, Dr. Olson-Kennedy took Clementine’s parents aside and privately, off the record, informed them the poor girl was suicidal, and the only thing that could save her life was to immediately begin aggressively transitioning. A year of testosterone later, Dr. Olson-Kennedy referred Clementine for her irreversible double mastectomy.
In her lawsuit, Clementine says she was not suicidal. Indeed, there is nothing in her voluminous medical record that even hints the girl ever considered taking her own life. To the contrary, she was often described as happy, “smiling,” and outgoing. In short, Dr. Olson-Kennedy lied —the worst, most despicable kind of lie— to Clem’s parents to terrify them into medically savaging their daughter’s healthy body.
Clem stopped taking testosterone about a year ago and began detransitioning in March. She now says she is much happier, even with the permanent side-effects of her unneeded treatments. This week she sued Dr. Olson-Kennedy and the surgeon who performed the double mastectomy, along with the gender therapist who rubber-stamped Dr. Dash’s recommendations, and twenty as-yet-unnamed “Doe Defendants” who conspired with the doctors to defraud Clementine.
I’ve described but the barest minimum of Clementine’s horrific ordeal. Read her complaint for more of the ghastly detail: Link to lawsuit against Olson-Kennedy and her co-conspirators.
The threat to the trans establishment is not the potential for a large money judgment. Presumably, Children’s Hospital would cover it. More threatening is the potential discovery. As stone-dumb and mixed-up as she is, Dr. Olson-Kennedy is somehow a cornerstone of the transgender high-rise. Discredit her, and the whole horrific edifice might soon topple over.
The lawsuit’s timing is remarkably prescient. It appeared both in court and in the media the same week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over Tennessee’s ban on the very same medical procedures Dr. Olson-Kennedy prescribed for Clementine. The Economist’s tone was subtly sympathetic to Clementine.
Clementine and her parents gave the Economist a long interview and tons of documents to review. Dr. Dash and Children’s Hospital refused to comment. So.
An unstoppable momentum is building behind the locomotive of sanity, which is hurtling down the tracks toward a final endpoint of our long national trans nightmare. It can’t come soon enough.
It would be great to see someone harshly punished for the irreparable damage to lives these hacks do.
Reading about all these detransitioners is really sad.
It becomes obvious they were under the spell of lefty, degenerate teachers and/or a Munchouse-by-proxy parent.
When they get free of those influences they “wake up,” so to speak and want their original body back.
But “doctors,” like this one have burned bridges for these unfortunates.
There is no real going back.
Sure, you can look a bit more like your own DNA, but you are incapable of having children now.
Poor thing isnt the only one I hope all he lawsuits put these butchers out of business. These clinics have multiplied like rabbits but these mutilated kids with ruined childhoods cant hit rewind. For heavens sake keep them away from todays psych drug pushers aka school shooter creators. Let them be kids with all of the problems every child has had to deal with.
I would like to see Pfizer sued into total Bankruptsy by all the victims and their Families