Trans-Affirming ‘Doctor’ Hides Evidence Kids Are Being Harmed

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a pediatrician affiliated with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, is embroiled in a scandal over a taxpayer-funded study she led, as The Federalist recently reported. Olson-Kennedy has long argued that turning gender-confused kids into lifelong medical patients — via puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries — is the best way to save them from despair and suicide.

But The New York Times has revealed that Olson-Kennedy’s own research shows this isn’t true. The 95 young patients whom she and her colleagues observed for two years (with $10 million in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)) showed no improvement in their mental health despite receiving “affirming” medical interventions. There goes the narrative.

So Olson-Kennedy did what any politically motivated, conflict-of-interest-riddled “expert” would do — she buried the research. Otherwise, she fretted, the evil forces that oppose the destruction of children’s bodies to cure a mental disorder might seize on the research to support their position in courts, legislatures, and the public mind. “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she told the Times.

One of those evil forces, J.K. Rowling, paraphrased the good doctor’s objection: “We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.”

None of this should surprise anyone who has followed Olson-Kennedy’s career in the trans industry limelight.

In the last episode, Olson-Kennedy was arguing for chopping off the healthy breasts of minor girls. Regret over this mutilating surgery rarely arises, she claimed, and even if it did, so what? If a young mastectomy victim decides later that she wants breasts, she can “go and get them.”

This nonchalance about steering children toward potentially lifelong misery seems to characterize Olson-Kennedy’s work. She revealed at a professional conference that many of her patients — the ones she gives irreversible drugs to and recommends for irreversible surgeries — suffer serious mental health problems that are obviously influencing their gender dysphoria: “Thirty percent of my sample had moderate to severe depression symptoms. Thought about suicide, 49 percent … Attempted suicide, over 30 percent … A lot of drug use … A lot of kids were sexually active, and a not insignificant number of my kids have actually done … sex work [prostitution].”

That a teen is actually working as a prostitute should be a red flag that all is not well in her world. So should we perhaps put such troubled kids into therapy to identify the root causes of their suffering? Unnecessary, says Olson-Kennedy. Comparing these trans-identifying patients to diabetics, she dismisses the value of therapy: “I don’t send someone to therapy when I’m going to start them on insulin.”

Everything about Olson-Kennedy’s personal and professional life supports her unwavering determination to transition as many confused children as possible. She’s civilly married to a male-identifying woman who, as a counselor, signs off on whatever documentation is necessary to place the young patients on the transgender conveyor belt. The two activists are highly sought-after speakers on the trans circuit.

Olson-Kennedy is also president-elect of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH), the U.S. affiliate of the radical advocacy organization World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Though claiming to be the sole arbiter of treatment standards and guidance for gender-confused patients, WPATH is now ensnared in a scandal of its own. High-level WPATH doctors have admitted in private to carrying out these medical interventions, including surgeries and administration of carcinogens, without the informed consent of their minor patients. But Olson-Kennedy seems unfazed.

The money keeps rolling in. Doctors like Olson-Kennedy in the trans industry reap substantial financial benefits from their ride on the gravy train. In 2018 a Vanderbilt University Medical Center professor crowed about how much money is available to doctors and hospitals willing to engage in these interventions. For their part, pharmaceutical companies are making billions from the expensive drugs and hormones injected into young patients (see here and here).

So the trans industry, fronted by doctors such as Olson-Kennedy, has a lot riding on the narrative that it’s improving and even saving kids’ lives by medicalizing their gender dysphoria. The result is the decision by Olson-Kennedy and her fellow researchers to bury their own research showing that their claims are bogus.

Republicans in Congress have announced an investigation into the Olson-Kennedy/NIH scandal and called for the release of the study results. Sunlight in this area of politicized federal “public health” is long overdue.

This episode illustrates much of the moral bankruptcy of the trans movement as it relates to the medical profession and the public health bureaucracy. Doctors set themselves up as unchallengeable authorities on medical interventions that make them wealthy. The federal government showers money on conflicted researchers to help them generate evidence that their work is helping patients and must continue.

When that research inconveniently shows the opposite, it is suppressed. Taxpayers are never told the truth unless it supports the approved narrative. And innocent patients suffer.

Everything about Big Trans in America is a lie — a lie propped up by a complicit public health bureaucracy. It’s past time for scrapping the whole corrupt structure.

Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.