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‘EGREGIOUS Standard of Care’: Detransitioner Sues Dr. Olson-Kennedy Who Prescribed Her Irreversible Drugs at Age 12

By” Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell | December 11, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/12/11/ill-never-know-body-wouldve-looked-detransitioner-sues-doctor-pushed-irreversible-trans-hormones-surgery/

When Clementine Breen began getting puberty blockers at age 12, she had no idea she was agreeing to become a lifelong patient. Breen, now a 20-year-old detransitioner, filed a lawsuit last Thursday against prominent child-gender specialist Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, alleging medical negligence.

Breen says Olson-Kennedy pushed her into irreversible transgender medical interventions at only 12 without proper psychological testing or monitoring of her mental health and the side effects of hormone regimens.

“I think telling me that the only treatment for my body issues was transitioning was kind of the worst thing for me, because in retrospect, I just have PTSD,” Breen told The Daily Signal. “I just needed treatment for what happened to me when I was a kid.”

Breen, currently a student at University of California-Los Angeles, not only began taking puberty blockers at 12 and testosterone at 13; she then had “top surgery”—a double mastectomy—at 14.

When she was 12, Breen went to her school guidance counselor to discuss negative feelings about her body. She didn’t know that her history as a victim of sexual abuse could be causing her discomfort with her identity as a woman.

“I was sexually assaulted when I was really young,” she said in an interview, “so I had a lot of like negative feelings about being a girl and being female. When I first expressed those feelings and looked for answers about that online, the first thing that came up was gender dysphoria and possible gender incongruence.”

Breen and the school guidance counselor reached the conclusion that she was transgender. But the counselor told her parents and teachers before she was sure that was the identity she wanted to claim, Breen said. Breen’s parents took her to see Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The hospital told The Daily Signal it does not “comment on pending litigation; and out of respect for patient privacy and in compliance with state and federal laws, we do not comment on specific patients and/or their treatment.”

Although Breen said her parents expected Olson-Kennedy to conclude that their daughter wasn’t transgender, since Breen experienced no gender dysphoria as a child, the doctor immediately affirmed that the preteen was a boy.

“At first it was a lot of surface-level questions about how I fit in and how I felt with my peers and how I felt about being a girl and what I wanted my future to look like,” Breen said. “I had so many negative feelings about being a girl, so I felt weirdly very validated when [Olson-Kennedy] told me that there was a very clear diagnosis of something physically wrong with my body and that it wasn’t me that was the problem.”

Olson-Kennedy convinced her parents to allow her to begin taking puberty blockers by telling them that the process was reversible, Breen told The Daily Signal. Shortly before she turned 14, Olson-Kennedy started her on testosterone.

“She proposed the idea of ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or living son’ to my parents, and I was not suicidal at the time,” Breen recalled. “So, I think she was sort of presenting that and the really grave statistics that are actually somewhat inaccurate to my parents, to incentivize them to keep going with the treatment.”

But the drugs only made Breen’s mental health worse.

“I was never actively suicidal before testosterone, but I was actively suicidal post-testosterone,” she recalled, “and I was much more symptomatic of things like depression or things that they were saying to my parents that they were treating with the cross-sex hormones.”

At 14, Breen underwent a double mastectomy to remove her breasts. Her mental state immediately got worse, and her anxiety developed into what she describes as a “psychotic break.”

“What really, really upset me is that I will never be able to breastfeed, and I will have to get surgery every 10 years to replace the implants, and it won’t look as natural as it should have been,” she said. “I will never know what my body should have looked like.”

Earlier this year, Breen began to discuss the past sexual abuse in therapy and to accept her female body.

“It wasn’t until I had actually gone through therapy that I started thinking, ‘Why am I really doing this?’ And I started actually picturing my future and when I got to college and I was in an all-male dorm,” she said, “and I just started looking around me. And I didn’t feel like I was living as myself.”

“I was living as somebody I created to run away from myself,” Breen told The Daily Signal.

At first, the 20-year-old didn’t want to go public. But as she reflected on her experience with Olson-Kennedy and the specialist’s “egregious” standard of care, Breen said, she became sure she needed to speak out.

Detrans Law, also known as the Law Firm of Campbell Miller Payne, is the legal representative for Breen in coordination with LiMandri & Jonna LLP and the Center for American Liberty.

“It would feel great to know not just that I would be getting justice, but that in the future, children would be treated better,” she said. “Because I think every child is entitled to proper diagnoses, proper mental health care, and I really hope that this [lawsuit] can change something about the standard of care.”

The butchery of young girls in the name of transgenderism must stop, Mark Trammell, executive director and general counsel of the Center for American Liberty, told The Daily Signal.

“It’s alarming how many young girls have been victimized by the gender-industrial complex,” Trammell said. “It’s imperative that every American takes a bold stand in the face of cancel culture to defend these girls’ innocence and basic human rights. If they’re not old enough to consent to a tattoo, they’re certainly not old enough to consent to double mastectomies and cross-sex hormones that alter their future.”

Olson-Kennedy came under fire in October for admitting to hiding the results of a two-year, $10 million, taxpayer-funded study that showed puberty blockers don’t improve children’s mental health. The physician directed the study, which involved putting 95 children who struggled with gender dysphoria on puberty blockers. The data won’t be released because “the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court,” New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi writes, summarizing Olson-Kennedy’s reasoning.

Based on her own experiences, Breen said, transgender medical interventions for children should be illegal. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last Wednesday in a case that is expected to decide whether states may ban irreversible transgender medical interventions for children.

In United States v. Skrmetti, the high court will decide whether a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers, hormone replacement regimens, and transgender surgeries for children is constitutional.

“I think it is important to tell kids that there’s nothing wrong with them physically, they’re perfect the way they are. And if they feel ashamed of who they are and ashamed of their body, that’s not their fault,” Breen said. “It’s other people’s fault for making them feel that way and learning to love yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself.”

Breen is hesitant to say transitioning is the wrong choice for everyone. But she doesn’t think kids can consent to procedures that are so “life-altering and impact fertility, impact function, impact your health, cholesterol, [and] bone density,” she said.

“A child can’t consent to becoming a lifelong patient,” Breen said.

When Clementine Breen started on puberty blockers, she was a 12-year-old child with no idea she wanted children of her own one day, she said. She shouldn’t have been allowed to make a decision that would potentially make her infertile, Breen added.

“I really hope in the future I can just move forward from this and live a happy life as a woman,” she said. “I really hope to be a mother one day. Hopefully, that’s possible. I have no idea. I hope I can just move forward from this and spend the rest of my life as who I was supposed to be.”

Looking back, Breen told The Daily Signal, she wishes that rather than prescribing puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy had told her that puberty is uncomfortable for everyone, especially girls who experienced sexual abuse.

“If she had just asked me if I had gone through sexual abuse, or if I had weird experiences in my childhood that may change my opinions about gender, I think I might have come to a different conclusion,” Breen said. “So, I really wish she sort of interrogated my ideas about womanhood.”

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Data: U.S. Hospitals Transitioned Nearly 6,000 Kids From 2019-2023


By: Ashley Bateman | October 11, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/11/data-u-s-hospitals-transitioned-nearly-6000-kids-from-2019-2023/

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New data shows U.S. hospitals performed at least 5,747 gender-disfiguring surgeries on minors between 2019 and 2023, according to a database released by Do No Harm, an advocacy group of medical professionals. The data also show 13,994 American children received other transgender treatments, such as puberty-blocking and opposite-sex hormones, in those four years.

Most of the children receiving such procedures were girls between the ages of 12 and 17, the database indicates. Medical practitioners made more than $119 million from the procedures, the data says.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) kicked out of its vendor hall four young Americans who returned to affirming their given sex after experiencing transgender medicine. A similar group of “desisters” met a warm welcome last month in Orlando, Florida, at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference. That medical conference hosted 750 medical practitioners from around the nation and featured a panel of detransitioned young adults.

At the CMA event, seven young adults who were permanently injured by sex-transition procedures publicly explained the harm these treatments cause. These young adults were given a voice at a U.S. annual medical conference for the first time, to inform and educate health practitioners about the irreparable harm caused by “gender medicine.”

“CMA’s decision to invite detransitioners to speak at this year’s conference signals a deepening in the divisions in the medical community about how to best address gender distress in young people,” a CMA press release notes. “It also shows the commitment by CMA leaders to recognize and provide care to those harmed by these common practices.”

Particularly in American “gender medicine,” negative and harmful effects have been ignored, and at times suppressed, by some major medical organizations, said Tim Millea, MD, the chairman of CMA’s Conscience Rights Protection Task Force. He said this contradicts the long-held scientific tradition of allowing “ideas to be discussed and debated in an open, honest and transparent manner.”

‘Medicine’s Ability to Harm Is Nearly Limitless’

Pediatrician Patrick Hunter, a Florida Board of Medicine member, organized the panel. He said he was aiming to “bring to light to the harm that is being done, and to improve the overall care for trans-identified youth.”

“No one should want what is happening to these youth and young adults,” Hunter said. “The fact that harm and regret is happening should not be tolerated by our profession. The lack of concern and the unwillingness to acknowledge it should concern everyone in the medical profession.”

One detransitioner, Prisha Mosley, told CMA attendees she was manipulated by activists and therapists into accepting testosterone injections and a double mastectomy as a minor.

“It is important for doctors to learn how to stop the damage and to try and heal what’s been done. It is wrong for the very profession who hurt detransitioners to also routinely turn us away,” she said in the CMA’s press release about the event. “I’m grateful for any medical professional who is willing to listen.”

Hunter said he has heard from nearly 100 youth who regret their transitions and found the panelists’ stories “very painful.” “Medicine’s ability to harm is nearly limitless, while the ability to cure does have limitations,” Hunter said.

“This is why the principle of ‘First, do not harm’ is sound and universally accepted,” he said. “It acknowledges our need for humility, our need to know where our limits lie, and when we should and should not act.”

Refusing to Acknowledge Detransitioners

Hunter said he proposed the panel to multiple medical organizations, encouraging more groups to hear detransitioners speak. Both the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) rejected the proposal, he said, matching the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) stance of ignoring detransitioners. WPATH’s leadership has said that recognizing these patients is “considered off limits for many in our community.”

“Patients are being harmed by sex transition. That cannot be disputed,” Hunter said. “Medical evidence fails to show that patients will reliably benefit. If the medical profession will not recognize and learn from those that are being harmed, we are failing as professionals, but more importantly we are failing the patients that are being harmed. The medical profession has lost its way.”

The Stop the Harm Database highlights a “dirty dozen” of the U.S. hospitals that perform the most sex-disfigurement surgeries on minors. They are:

  • The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  • Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
  • Children’s Minnesota
  • Seattle Children’s
  • Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
  • Boston Children’s Hospital
  • Rady Children’s Hospital
  • Children’s National Medical Center
  • UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland
  • Children’s Hospital Colorado
  • UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
  • Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

The database also lists the employers of the U.S. doctors who billed the most for performing child mutilation surgeries from 2019 to 2023. The top-billing doctor for child sex surgeries in that timeframe worked at Boston Children’s hospital and charged more than $5 million for the procedures.

“California, one of the first states to declare itself a ‘sanctuary state’ for transgender procedures, also had the most irreversible surgeries, with 1,359 minors undergoing surgical procedures, followed by Oregon with 357, Washington with 330, Pennsylvania with 316 and Massachusetts with 300,” Fox News reported on the Do No Harm data.

Warring Medical Organizations

Many European countries have curtailed or halted gender medicine interventions in approximately the last year, based on experience and research demonstrating its serious damage to children. Yet most American medical organizations have remained staunch advocates, dismissing well-documented risks and complications associated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.

The United Kingdom’s release of the Cass Review in April and leaked WPATH files indicating that organization pushes medicine without informed consent sent clear messages about transgender medicine that American medical organizations such as the AMA and the AAP have largely dismissed or ignored. They are ignoring “objective and evidence-based data,” Millea said.

Still, some U.S. medical organizations do oppose gender mutilation, including the American College of Pediatricians, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, American College of Family Medicine, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration,” published by ACPEDS, represents thousands of health care workers who want such practices ended.

“A number of cases have been and will continue to be filed in courts around the country, challenging the federal and state mandates for transgender interventions and the freedom of medical professionals to challenge these methods and refuse to participate in them,” Millea said.

The CMA will support court cases to halt this harm in medicine, joining other organizations’ challenges in the form of amicus briefs, and if necessary, serving as plaintiffs, Millea said.

Last month, state attorneys general sent a letter to the AAP president demanding the AAP defend its support of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria. The attorney generals requested a thorough explanation of this non-evidence-based policy by October 8.

“I heard from many attendees that the panel discussion was the most important thing they heard all week, and maybe at any conference,” Hunter said. “The medical profession cannot remain silent any longer. We must take action and speak out. We must seek regulation of the profession so that evidence-based, ethical, and effective care is provided for trans-identified youth. We must return medicine to its roots where we care for the individual, and not use the patient to make money, or forward social or political agendas.”

Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.

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Detransitioner to sue ‘mutilators’ who ‘butchered’ her body


By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | November 15, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/detransitioner-to-sue-mutilators-who-butchered-her-body.html/

Detransitioner Chloe Cole, 17, speaks about her experience undergoing trans medicalization as a young teenager in a meeting with Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo in July 2022. | Screengrab: Twitter/Joseph A. Ladapo

A detransitioner is suing doctors who performed body mutilating sex-change surgeries on her as a minor, seeking to hold accountable the “mutilators” who “butchered” her. 

Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old detransitioner residing in California, has filed a notice of intent to sue the medical facilities that performed procedures that have left her disfigured. The notice of intent to sue in California Superior Court lists three doctors practicing in the Los Angeles area and two medical companies based in California as defendants in the pending lawsuit. The lawsuit will move forward 90 days after the publication of the notice of intent to sue, on Feb. 9, 2023, “unless this matter can be resolved prior to that time.”

A detransitioner is a person who formerly self-identified as the opposite sex but has now become comfortable with their biological sex. 

In a statement announcing the letter of intent to sue, Cole described her teenage years as “a culmination of excruciating pain, regret, and most importantly injustice.” Cole recalled that she was “emotionally and physically damaged and stunted by so-called medical professionals in my most important developmental period.”

“I was butchered by an institution that we trust more than anything else in our lives,” she added. “What is worse is that I am not alone in my pain. I will ensure that the blood and tears of detransitioners like me will not be in vain. It is impossible for me to recoup what I have lost, but I will fight to ensure that no other children will be harmed at the hands of these liars and mutilators.”

Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, is representing Cole in her litigation. Dhillon vowed to “hold the ‘professionals’ involved accountable for their deliberate choices to mutilate children and financially benefit from it without regard to the human tragedies they’ve created,” adding, “We will break the cycle of them breaking America’s children before it’s too late.”

The notice of intent to sue elaborates on Cole’s circumstances: “Chloe is a biological female who suffered from a perceived psychological issue ‘gender dysphoria,’” the document states. “Under Defendants’ advice and supervision, between 13-17 years old Chloe underwent harmful transgender treatment, specifically, puberty blockers, off-label cross-sex hormone treatment, and a double mastectomy.”

The notice classified Cole’s experience as a form of “medical experimentation,” adding, “She now has deep emotional wounds, severe regrets, and distrust for the medical system.” Specifically, the letter adds that because of acts carried out by the defendants, Cole “suffered mutilation to her body and lost social development with her peers at milestones that can never be reversed or regained.”

“Defendants coerced Chloe and her parents to undergo what amounted to a medical experiment by propagating two lies. First, Defendants falsely informed Chloe and her parents that Chloe’s gender dysphoria would not resolve unless Chloe socially and [medically] transitioned to appear more like a male. Chloe has been informed by her parents that Defendants even gave them the ultimatum: ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?’”

The notice of intent to sue notes that “the vast majority of childhood gender dysphoria cases resolve by the time the child reaches adulthood, with the patient’s self-perception reverting back to align with their biological sex.”

According to the letter, “Despite an undeniable body of relevant medical literature, Defendants never once informed Chloe of the possibility, indeed the high likelihood, that her gender dysphoria would resolve, without cross-sex treatment, by the time she reached adulthood.”

“Defendants fraudulently concealed that information from Chloe that the only way to resolve her psychological condition was to undergo physical, chemical, and social transition to a male role,” the document added. 

Citing a longterm study finding that “gender dysphoric individuals who undergo sex reassignment continue to have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity as compared with the general population,” the letter lamented that “Defendants intentionally obscured these facts and defrauded Chloe and her parents in order to perform what amounted to a lucrative transgender medical experiment on Chloe.”

Although Cole was “advised that the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” her “distress always came back worse” following the “initial relief” that occurred after “each phase of transition.” Cole’s double mastectomy, which was performed on her at 15, caused her to experience suicidal thoughts and a deteriorating state of mental health.

Cole told Fox News opinion host Tucker Carlson last week that the doctors named as defendants in the letter committed medical malpractice. The notice of intent to sue outlined some of the claims of medical malpractice, including the absence of “specific information regarding the actual risks of the testosterone and puberty blockers” she was first prescribed at age 13. 

Side effects of puberty blockers include: “Permanent fertility loss, painful intercourse, impairment of orgasm, reduced bone development and inability to obtain peak or maximum bone density, stopped or stunted widening and growth of the pelvic bones for reproductive purposes, increased risk of osteoporosis and debilitating spine and hip fractures as an adult, increased morbidity and death in older age due to increased risk of hip fracture, negative and unknown effects on brain development, emotional liability such as crying, irritability, impatience, anger, and aggression, and reports of suicidal ideation and attempt.”

While much of the notice of intent to sue contains redacted information about the medical consequences of the experimental procedures performed on Cole’s body, the document concludes with an assessment of damages caused by the drugs and operations performed on her body over the course of several years. Cole will seek $350,000 from each of the three doctors named as defendants in the lawsuit and both healthcare organizations where the procedures were performed, making it possible that she could be awarded up to $1,750,000 in damages altogether.

The notice of intent to sue comes shortly after Cole has emerged as one of the most prominent detransitioners in the U.S. Cole founded the support group Detrans United, established to provide detransitioners who regret their attempts at gender transitions with a platform to voice their “dissent against ‘gender-affirming care,’ [and] influence policy.”

Cole has voiced her dissent against sex-change surgeries for minors by calling into a school board meeting last month at Conejo Valley Unified School District in Ventura County, California. Cole expressed concern about the school district’s distribution of a book to 8-year-old students teaching that children could be born in the wrong body. Cole warned that exposing children to such material could lead them to make ill-fated decisions like the ones she made when she was experiencing gender dysphoria.

“I will not be able to breastfeed any children I have in the future and my sexuality has permanently been affected because I was allowed to make adult decisions starting at 13, and then again at 15,” she said at the meeting. “This is what happens when children are sexualized and exposed to developmentally inappropriate and confusing content and ideas from a young age. This is what happens when we treat children like adults and expect them to have the mental faculties for proper long-term decision making.”

In light of the concerns about the longterm impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and body-mutilating surgeries on minors, the states of Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have banned such procedures for children younger than 18, while the Florida Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine voted to do the same earlier this month. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services classified such procedures as a form of child abuse, as has the state’s Republican attorney general. 

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

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