Doctors Hide Study Results Showing ‘Transitioning’ Kids Is Harmful

Doctors who “transition” gender-confused children like to claim their work is “evidence-based” and “life-saving.” But as one of their leaders just admitted to The New York Times, they are rigging the evidence.

As the Times recently reported, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has refused to publish the results of a study (begun in 2015 and funded by millions of taxpayer dollars) on the use of puberty blockers for children who identify as transgender. She says this suppression is because “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” So she has been stalling, for obviously self-serving reasons.

Olson-Kennedy is, as the Times explains, “one of the country’s most vocal advocates of adolescent gender treatments and has served as an expert witness in many legal challenges to the state bans. She said she was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use blockers.’” 

Well, yes, because, as she admitted here, her research found that giving kids puberty blockers did not result in improvements to their mental health. Olson-Kennedy tried to spin this by claiming of her patients: “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years.” But as the Times notes, “That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.”

The problem for Olson-Kennedy is that her null results mean she is stuck either way. If puberty blockers don’t help improve mental health among gender-confused children, then there is no reason to give them to children, regardless of whether they are “in really good shape” or depressed and suicidal. It doesn’t matter which narrative she settles on, because the results she is refusing to publish completely undermine the case for transitioning minors.

And she has staked everything on medically transitioning kids. As the Times notes, Olson-Kennedy “runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.” She is just one example of how there is a massive conflict of interest at the heart of most research on wrongly named “gender-affirming care.” The people studying the efficacy of medical transition tend to be the same people whose livelihoods and reputations will be ruined if medical transition is shown to be ineffective. 

These practitioners tend to view themselves as medical heroes, saving children from the anguish of being trapped in the “wrong” bodies. But if it is the doctors who are wrong, then they are monsters who mutilate children, for which they may face a ruinous reckoning. This is why, when their research contradicts their ideology and self-image, they insist that the data must be mistaken. And so, per the Times, Olson-Kennedy argued “that doctors’ clinical experience was often undervalued in discussions of research. She has prescribed puberty blockers and hormonal treatments to transgender children and adolescents for 17 years, she said, and has observed how profoundly beneficial they can be.”

Of course, this is the same doctor who infamously said about girls who have their breasts amputated: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them!” Well, no, they can’t, and the casual cruelty of her comment should call into question her clinical judgment. Her arrogance, along with the casual dismissal of her own data, also raises the question of how much other research has been suppressed or manipulated in service to transgender ideology. 

The New York Times piece missed some opportunities to address this. For example, in discussing the work that originally promoted the use of puberty blockers for kids who identify as transgender, it neglected the devastating critiques that have since been leveled at that research. Likewise, it overlooked some of the flaws of a study on cross-sex hormones in adolescents, though it at least noted the extraordinarily high suicide rate of its subjects — which should be devastating for a treatment that is promoted as preventing suicide.

Despite these lapses, it is good that The New York Times is questioning transgender ideology despite threats from the LGBT mob whenever it does so. This suggests the left might be slowly talking itself into throwing transgender ideology overboard, especially if the election goes poorly for them. Some of the most effective GOP ads have focused on Democrats’ embrace of transgender radicalism, which has become a major political liability for them.

And there may be more than political calculation at work. The natural law finds a way. Many New York Times-reading left-liberals who approved of transgender ideology when it was far away and theoretical are alarmed by its implementation closer to home. They are having second thoughts now that it is their daughters who are frightened over having to share bathrooms and locker rooms with males. They have doubts now that it is their sons suddenly demanding to be put on estrogen or their daughters demanding to have their breasts amputated. 

If The New York Times running stories exposing the junk science of “gender-affirming care” is what it takes for liberals to feel comfortable speaking out, so be it. Those of us who have been in this fight for years should welcome these late-arriving reinforcements. Ending the evil of transitioning children matters more than getting the credit or going on an “I told you so” victory lap. 

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.