Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the nation’s leading practitioner of transgender youth medicine, faces a medical-negligence lawsuit for the irreversible treatments she administered to a former patient, who has since detransitioned.
Kaya Clementine Breen, now 20, alleges that Olson-Kennedy, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), and numerous other defendants rushed her into transitioning to a male in spite of her struggles with mental health and history of suffering sexual abuse. The plaintiff’s transgender treatments involved puberty blockers at age 12, cross-sex hormones at 13, and finally a double mastectomy at 14. The complaint was filed Thursday in Los Angeles.
Olson-Kennedy, who serves as medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at CHLA, allegedly performed no psychological assessment, failed to ask Breen about her past trauma and mental state, and diagnosed gender dysphoria without consulting any other physicians. Furthermore, Olson-Kennedy allegedly did not adequately take into account the detrimental effects that puberty blockers would have on Breen’s bone density.
The lawsuit accuses the primary defendant of outright lying in several instances. Olson-Kennedy lied to Breen and her parents that puberty blockers were “completely reversible,” according to the suit. The pediatric doctor also allegedly lied about Breen’s purported suicidal thoughts to her parents when trying to convince them about hormonal therapy.
The young girl had no suicidal thoughts, the lawsuit says, nor did she express that she had during her medical appointments.
Olson-Kennedy then allegedly lied that Breen would commit suicide if she did not receive cross-sex hormones. Confronted with their daughter’s hypothetical death, the parents relented and agreed to the testosterone treatment. Breen also hesitantly agreed.
“Upon information and belief, threatening that a child will commit suicide unless undergoing cross-sex medicalization is a common tactic Dr. Olson-Kennedy and others at LA Children’s engage in to convince uninformed parents who are averse to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery to treat their gender-confused children,” the 29-page lawsuit states.
Olson-Kennedy later recommended that Breen get a double mastectomy, a surgical procedure that removes both breasts. The doctor again misled the minor and parents, claiming it’s important to undergo the procedure at an early age because the healing process would be supposedly easier than at an later age, according to the suit.
“That is, if she wanted a ‘natural,’ ‘cis male-looking chest,’ they had to do it now,” the lawsuit says.
In a letter to the mastectomy surgeon, who is one of the many defendants, Olson-Kennedy said Breen had “endorsed a male gender identity since childhood” — a clear misrepresentation of the patient’s gender identity. This claim was contradicted by Olson-Kennedy’s own records.
The surgeon proceeded with the double mastectomy, even though he did not meet Breen himself the day before the surgery. He met with Breen and her mother for about 30 minutes the morning of the surgery.
After the transgender treatments, Breen began suffering extreme depression, anger, and suicidal thoughts, the suit says. Wracked with mental health issues, she started harming her own body.
Breen stopped taking testosterone last year and started detransitioning in March, The Economist reported Friday after interviewing the plaintiff. She is considering breast reconstruction surgery.
“I mentioned that I might be trans,” she said in recalling a conversation with her high school guidance counselor, “but I also mentioned that I might be a lesbian and that I might be bisexual, like I wasn’t really sure about my identity at all.”
Her confusion likely stemmed from trauma following a violent encounter with her severely autistic brother and sexual abuse that started as early as six or seven years old. She reportedly was sexually assaulted again months before her mastectomy. No psychiatrist or doctor had ever asked her about sexual trauma, the lawsuit notes.
The plaintiff is seeking monetary damages for rushed medical treatments, about which she hopes to raise more awareness.
“People are just brushing exactly what happened to me off as something that doesn’t happen,” she told The Economist.
CHLA said it does not comment on pending litigation or patients and their treatments.
Olson-Kennedy has come under intense scrutiny for refusing to publish the findings of a nearly $10 million study funded by the National Institutes of Health that found no evidence that puberty blockers improved the mental health of children.
In a revealing interview with the New York Times in October, she admitted that the long-awaited study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender youth treatments and that the findings would be used in court to argue against puberty blockers. The study began in 2015.
Six Republican senators took issue with the unpublished NIH study in a Thursday letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli, inquiring about the lack of transparency in funded medical studies.
The lawsuit and letter come after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti regarding a Tennessee law that bans so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors. The Court’s conservative majority is expected to uphold the ban.