#Johanna Olson-Kennedy

[prcg]

Un 'doctor' que afirma ser trans oculta evidencia de que los niños están siendo perjudicados

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, una pediatra afiliada al Hospital Infantil de Los Ángeles, está envuelta en un escándalo por un estudio financiado por los contribuyentes que ella dirigió, como informó recientemente The Federalist. Olson-Kennedy tiene largo argumentó que convertir a niños con confusión de género en pacientes médicos de por vida (a través de bloqueadores de la pubertad, hormonas del sexo…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

Many studies have come out about transgender people in recent weeks. One study, for In recent weeks, several studies have emerged focusing on transgender individuals. One study in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior, for example, reported up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts in states passing anti-trans legislation, including healthcare bans. Another study, with minimal loss to follow-up, found extremely low detransition rates among transgender youth over 6 to 10 years, along with high levels of satisfaction regarding their care. Yet, you won’t find these stories on The New York Times' website. Instead, as has become routine at the paper, there’s yet another hit piece on transgender care—one that, upon closer inspection, offers a distorted and unfounded portrayal of the current research and one researcher who has helped push that research forward.

The latest piece, which went viral in anti-trans circles on Wednesday, was written by Azeen Ghorayshi, who has a track record of publishing anti-trans articles, including a glowing profile of Jamie Reed, an anti-trans clinician who shared private information about patients at her clinic—some of which was later proven false. This new article makes explosive claims that Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a prominent gender researcher, is withholding potentially negative research on the risks and benefits of puberty blockers for transgender youth.

[...] Olson-Kennedy stands as a leading researcher in pediatric gender medicine, with a wide array of studies on the effectiveness of gender-affirming care, the mental health of transgender youth, and differences in treatment protocols. Her expertise gives her a unique perspective on the complexities of studying transgender youth and the risks of poorly analyzed data being weaponized—something Ghorayshi's article exemplifies. Contrary to the article’s framing, Olson-Kennedy has not held back on publishing important articles from the TYC grant. In fact, she has consistently published research on transgender youth, including studies on puberty blockers, from the grant. What she has done is exercise caution, understanding the limitations of her data and recognizing how, in today’s charged climate, misinterpretation and underpowered studies can be used to harm transgender people. By doing so, she has protected both the integrity of her research and the community it serves.

The New York Times continues their shoddy reporting on trans issues.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Azeen Ghorayshi

Published: Oct 23, 2024

The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.

An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.

The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.

The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.

But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.

“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

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.

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said 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.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

She said that she intends to publish the data, but that the team had also been delayed because the N.I.H. had cut some of the project’s funding. She attributed that cut, too, to politics, which the N.I.H. denied. (The broader project has received $9.7 million in government support to date.)

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is 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 because it doesn’t impact them,” referring to transgender adolescents.

Other researchers, however, were alarmed by the idea of delaying results that would have immediate implications for families around the world.

“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” said Amy Tishelman, a clinical and research psychologist at Boston College who was one of the study’s original researchers.

Dr. Tishelman also noted that, even if the drugs did not lead to psychological improvements, they may have prevented some of the children from getting worse. “No change isn’t necessarily a negative finding — there could be a preventative aspect to it,” she said. “We just don’t know without more investigation.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, doctors in the Netherlands began studying a small group of children who had experienced intense gender dysphoria since early childhood. For most of these children, the negative feelings dissipated by puberty. For others, puberty made them feel worse.

For those who struggled, the researchers began prescribing puberty blockers, which had long been used to treat children whose puberty began unusually early. The Dutch scientists reasoned that by preventing the permanent changes of puberty, transgender adolescents would fare better psychologically and fit in more comfortably in society as adults.

In 2011, the researchers reported on the first 70 children who were treated with the so-called Dutch Protocol. The children were thoroughly assessed to make sure that they had persistent dysphoria and supportive parents and that they did not have serious psychiatric conditions that might interfere with treatment.

These patients showed some psychological improvements after puberty blockers: fewer depressive symptoms, as well as significant declines in behavioral and emotional problems. All the patients chose to continue their gender transitions by taking testosterone or estrogen.

The findings were highly influential even before they were published, and clinics around the world opened to treat transgender adolescents with puberty blockers and hormones.

England’s youth gender clinic in 2011 tried to replicate the Dutch results with a study of 44 children. But at a conference five years later, the British researchers reported that puberty blockers had not changed volunteers’ well-being, including rates of self-harm. Those results were not made public until 2020, years after puberty blockers had become the standard treatment for children with gender dysphoria in England.

In 2020, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s group described the initial psychological profile of the children enrolled in the U.S. study of puberty blockers, whose average age was 11. Before receiving the drugs, around one quarter of the group reported depression symptoms and significant anxiety, and one quarter reported ever having thoughts of suicide. Eight percent reported a past suicide attempt.

In a progress report submitted to the N.I.H. at that time, Dr. Olson-Kennedy outlined her hypothesis of how the children would fare after two years on puberty blockers: that they would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

That hypothesis does not seem to have borne out. “They have good mental health on average,” Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in the interview with The New York Times. “They’re not in any concerning ranges, either at the beginning or after two years.” She reiterated this idea several times.

When asked in follow-up emails to clarify how the children could have good initial mental health when her preliminary findings had showed one quarter of them struggling, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said that, in the interview, she was referring to data averages and that she was still analyzing the full data set.

Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician who this year published an extensive review of youth gender services in England, said that the delays from the American and British research groups had led the public to believe that puberty blockers improved mental health, even though scant evidence backed up that conclusion.

“It’s really important we get results out there so we understand whether it’s helpful or not, and for whom,” Dr. Cass said.

Her report found weak evidence for puberty blockers and noted some risks, including lags in bone growth and fertility loss in some patients. It prompted the National Health Service in England to stop prescribing the drugs outside of a new clinical trial, following similar pullbacks in several other European countries.

An N.I.H. spokesman said that while the agency generally encourages the publication of data supported by its grants, researchers decide how and when to do so.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s collaborators have also not yet published data they collected on how puberty blockers affected the adolescents’ bone development.

But many other papers have been published from the wider N.I.H. project, including a 2023 study of older transgender and nonbinary adolescents who took estrogen or testosterone to aide their gender transition. After two years on hormones, the volunteers showed improvements in life and body satisfaction, and patients taking testosterone showed declines in depression and anxiety. (Two of the 315 patients died by suicide, a rate much higher than the general population.)

Dr. Olson-Kennedy noted 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.

Although the N.I.H. studies are large, she said, “these are minuscule compared to the amount of people that we’ve taken care of.”

==

This is fraud. When scientists - or, perhaps, people who simply "identify" as scientists - are given public money, they work for the public. They have no business hiding the results or trying to manipulate it to conform to their ideological commitments.

"I do not want our work to be weaponized."

What she's saying is that she doesn't want reality to be used against her ideology.

When the John Templeton Foundation, an unabashedly Xian organization, spon.sored "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer" but found that prayer was worse than ineffective, they still published it as they had to.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002870305006496

Conclusions Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

Reminder that this is the same woman who said of adolescent mastectomies that, "if you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go get them."

[unbreakingthegirl]

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who is one of the most prominent and influential physician-researchers in pediatric gender medicine, has been hit with a damning lawsuit by a former patient. The plaintiff reports having suffered from severe, worsening mental illness while Dr. Olson-Kennedy oversaw her gender-transition treatment, including a double mastectomy at age 14. Now a college student, she recently detransitioned. The lawsuit accuses Dr. Olson-Kennedy of prescribing the plaintiff, then a newly-gender-questioning 12 year old, puberty blockers following a single cursory appointment and no assessment with a mental health professional; of coercing the girl’s wary parents into consenting to testosterone therapy by insisting their child, who had no history of suicidality, would kill herself without such irreversible treatment; and of failing to provide the family with proper informed consent. It was only after the girl started taking testosterone at age 13 and had her breasts surgically removed the following year that she actually became suicidal and tried to take her own life, according to the suit. The girl reportedly suffered increasingly severe psychosis, including auditory and visual hallucinations. Dr. Olson-Kennedy ultimately recommended a hysterectomy when the girl was 17.

[beardedmrbean]

A UCLA student is suing two California doctors, alleging they inappropriately "fast-tracked" her for an "irreversibly damaging" gender transition, starting when she was 12 years old.

Kaya Clementine Breen, now 20, filed her suit Thursday accusing Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who runs the nation's largest transgender youth clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and numerous other defendants, of rushing her into transition to a male and overlooking her mental health struggles and history of sexual abuse.

"She needed psychotherapy," the suit reads in part. Instead, Breen was "fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging" transgender medical procedures.

Breen began puberty blockers at age 12, started cross-sex hormones at 13 and underwent a double mastectomy at 14, according to the suit.

Olson-Kennedy diagnosed Breen with gender dysmorphia "mere minutes" into their first appointment and recommended puberty blockers at the same meeting, according to the suit, which accuses the doctor of concealing important information and even outright lying to Breen and her parents about the risks and necessity of treatments.

A spokesperson for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles told Fox News Digital on Monday that the Center for Transyouth Health and Development "has provided high quality, age-appropriate, medically necessary care for more than 30 years."

The spokesperson continued in an email that the center does not comment on pending litigation, nor does it comment on specific patients and their treatment.

Olson-Kennedy came under attack this fall after admitting to The New York Times that her team had not yet published research showing that puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements among young people to avoid the findings being "weaponized" by critics of transgender medical procedures.

Breen started seeing a therapist shortly before attending college and realized she "may not actually be ‘trans’ but rather had been suffering from PTSD and other issues related to her unresolved trauma," according to the suit.

She has since stopped taking testosterone and says her mental health has improved, but "her body has been irreversibly and profoundly damaged" to the point that she is "almost certainly infertile," the suit claims.

The Golden State has increasingly positioned itself as a sanctuary for transgender people, passing a shield law prohibiting police from cooperating with out-of-state prosecutions for people who seek transgender medical procedures and drugs in California, and banning school districts from notifying parents if their child identifies as a gender that's different from their school record.

Breen's lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed the day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether states can ban gender transition care for minors.

Also named in her suit are Dr. Scott Mosser and the Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco. Olson-Kennedy recommended Breen get top-surgery from Mosser, and surgery was scheduled "after a perfunctory virtual meeting" with someone on Mosser's staff, the lawsuit says.

The day of the surgery, Mosser met with Breen and her mother for less than 30 minutes before he "rubber-stamped" the operation.

A spokesperson for the Gender Confirmation Center cited HIPAA when declining to comment on "protected health information or pending litigation," but told Fox News Digital in an email that there is "no such thing as a rubber-stamped patient interaction at the GCC."

The center referred Fox News Digital to an additional statement from Mosser reading in part, "Our robust processes and protocols are designed to ensure that patients navigating our services fully understand the implications of the gender-affirming procedures they may choose to undergo as part of their transition."

The statement continued, "We regularly hear from former patients sharing updates about the overwhelmingly positive impact these surgeries have had on their lives—messages that continue to arrive many years after their procedures."

[starseedpatriot]

I support the death penalty for those convicted of crimes against children:

NEW: Doctor delays federally funded puberty blockers report for political reasons

An influential American physician has admitted to delaying, for nine years, the publication of a taxpayer-funded study on the mental health effects of puberty blockers in youth with gender dysphoria for fear that the results could be used to support prohibitions of so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a leading Los Angeles physician who runs the largest youth gender clinic in the United States, told the New York Times that she and her colleagues have delayed publication of results from a two-year-long study funded by the National Institutes of Health because they worried that the findings would be used by critics of transgender procedures for minors.

READ | XPOST

[cultivating-wildflowers]

"The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care."

And from Wikipedia:

In December 2024, Olson-Kennedy was sued by a 20-year old female detransitioner, alleging she had caused permanent harm by a rushed diagnosis of gender dysphoria "mere minutes" after first seeing the plaintiff at age 12, who went on to receive puberty blockers and a double mastectomy at age 14. The lawsuit also names the St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco and a second doctor as defendants, alleging that the latter had "rubber-stamped" the mastectomy. The same day, a group of Republican senators announced an inquiry into her unpublished NIH study. All senators involved except for one had previously sponsored a ban on youth gender-affirming care.

Worth noting: The leader of this study, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, is married to a trans-identifying "therapist" who runs a gender clinic.

[eternal-echoes]

“For example, Dr. Johanna Olson Kennedy conducted a study of nearly one hundred young people who had double mastectomies, and said, "Self-reported regret was near 0.”(14) One limitation of this study, and many others like it, is that the follow-up research ended between one to five years post-operation. So if the young women received the operation at the age of thirteen (which some did), it meant that a fourteen-year-old had no regrets. Might the same teenager feel differently in her midtwenties when she wants to breastfeed her newborn and cannot? Furthermore, 28 percent of the young people either refused to reply to Olson Kennedy's survey or were lost to follow-up. If one of these individuals had committed suicide after the procedure, how would she reply to the researchers that she was not satisfied with the outcome of the surgery?”

-Jason Evert, Male, Female, or Other: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender

—

Work cited:

14) Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy et al., “Chest Reconstruction and Chest Dysphoria in Transmasculine Minors and Young Adults,” JAMA Pediatrics (May 2018), 431-436.

—

For more recommended resources on gender dysphoria, click here.

[darkmaga-returns]

On Procrustean gender ideologues.

Pedro L. Gonzalez

Oct 25, 2024

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is one of the most aggressive advocates of normalizing “gender-affirming care” for minors, and she just admitted to suppressing a study on the effects of puberty blockers because the results did not support her mission to push these procedures on children.

Simply put, the data has not seen the light of day because it does not say what she wants it to say, and she remarkably confessed that to The New York Times. J.K. Rowling summed it up neatly in a tweet: “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.”

Olson-Kennedy is a dyed-in-the-wool true believer. She’s president elect of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, and her record includes methodologically shoddy government-funded research that recommended mastectomies for minors and bragging about using the legal system to take kids away from “recalcitrant” parents who don’t want to transition their boys and girls. More on that later.

The study in question now began in 2015 “as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth,” The Times reported. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues gave 95 kids from across America blockers that stall the manifestation of secondary sex characteristics, like breasts in girls and deepening voices in boys. They wanted to prove that this is a surefire way to improve the mental health of youths who feel distressed and confused about their bodies.

The majority of these cases resolve themselves by puberty. Introducing blockers into the mix potentially complicates that.

[ask-a-radfem]

How does radical feminism explain dysphoria? I agree with the basis of 'if the only reason you think you're trans stems from being treated badly as a girl, feeling unsafe and thinking it'd be easier to be a guy' etc, that's probably not a gender thing, that's just being aware of unequality. But what about stuff like dysphoria that is separate from that? I also have never really met anyone who cited those reasons for figuring out they were trans, I feel like I only see it from rad fem blogs talking about it.

This answer is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, clip compilation of videos and reading, because your question sparked like five different responses and reactions in my head haha. (Great question anon.)

So, different types of diagnoses are different, you can have a disease (caused by a single biological thing, like cancer which is caused by uncontrolled cell growth, or AIDS which is caused by a virus) or you can have a disorder which is characterised by a list of symptoms.

Here is the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria in children :

I would have met 4-5 of those as a kid. If i had hated my sexed body, i could have qualified for a dysphoria diagnosis. So that's one criticism of the diagnostic criteria, it leaves open the possibility that quite standard gender nonconformity combined with distress over puberty is diagnosed as dysphoria. So is dysphoria completely separate from sexism or being treated worse as a girl? By the criteria themselves, not really.

Here's a video with more discussion about the criteria:

We don't know what causes dysphoria, or if it is one thing. We don't know if distressed teenager who meets these criteria is going through the same thing as a little boy being coached to understand his gender nonconformity as being in the wrong body, like the child described in this clip (the woman speaking is Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who is Medical Director of the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles):

Feminist analysis about dysphoria is relatively new, but some women connect it to feminist discussion about anorexia, the plastic surgery industry and anti-psychiatry. You can start out with this article by Victoria Smith and the books she mentions (may be paywalled, archive link here):

Here is an interesting video by a detrans woman about girls growing up in toxic online communities:

Also no compilation like this would be complete without mentioning the book Detransition: Beyond Before and After by Max Robinson. It may be hard to get a physical copy but there is an audiobook or ebook option too.

[itsawritblr]

UCLA student sues California doctors, says she was 'fast-tracked' into transgender surgery.

Kaitlyn Schwanemann. Thu, December 19, 2024 at 12:45 PM CST

A UCLA student is suing multiple California health care providers and hospitals for medical negligence, alleging she was wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria and then “fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery, according to her lawsuit.

Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, said she experienced sexual abuse as a young child, and by the time she was 11, she “began struggling with the thought of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier if she were a boy,” according to her suit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. When she expressed this to her then-school counselor, the counselor told her “that she was transgender and called her parents to tell them the same.”

Breen, who was also suffering from anxiety, depression and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit, was then taken by her parents to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she said she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria — the distress one can experience when their gender identity and birth sex are in conflict — and began to receive transition-related care at 12 years old.

“This case is about a team of purported health care providers who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health struggles and suffering from multiple instances of sexual abuse should be prescribed a series of life-altering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, ultimately, receive a double mastectomy at the age of 14,” Breen’s lawsuit states.

Breen began receiving puberty-suppressing medication at 12, was prescribed cross-sex hormones from 13 to 19 and underwent a double mastectomy at 14, according to court documents, which stated that her “her mental health progressively declined” following these treatments.

In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Breen said, “In retrospect, I wish that somebody had suggested real, genuine therapy first, instead of gender-specific therapy, because really the only therapy that I received until much later was specifically focused on gender dysphoria, and didn’t connect my gender dysphoria to anything else.”

Breen said she began to question her decision to transition after she started dialectical behavior therapy, a type of talk therapy that seeks to help those struggling with intense emotions, earlier this year.

“I sort of started questioning my own gender identity and if I was doing this for the right reasons,” she said.

The defendants in Breen’s lawsuit include Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an adolescent medicine physician specializing in gender-affirming care; Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Mosser, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender-affirming surgery; the Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco; UCSF Health Community Hospitals; and psychotherapist Susan P. Landon.

When asked to comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson said the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where Olson-Kennedy works, has “provided high quality, age-appropriate, medically necessary care for more than 30 years.”

“Treatment is patient- and family-centered, following guidelines from professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Endocrine Society. We do 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,” the spokesperson said in an email, adding that “Dr. Olson-Kennedy is unavailable for comment.”

She's not alone. The tide is turning. The lawsuits are happening!

Now with the UK having made all trans surgeries for minors illegal, along with several other nations, the U.S. is going to find it damn difficult to deny that the therapists, clinics, and hospitals didn't know permanent harm was being done to thousands of children.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine for Erin In The Morning:

On Monday, a team of nine international experts on transgender care drafted a 39-page response paper to the Cass Review. The paper argues that the Cass Review, including the additional York Reviews, has numerous methodological problems in both how it was conducted and how it interprets its data, and that it has been grossly misused by governmental bodies across the world in justifying bans on gender affirming care, especially for minors. The Cass Review is a review of the literature on puberty blockers’ effects on transgender youth conducted by Dr. Hillary Cass, a researcher who has no prior experience working with transgender youth, and who has consulted with Ron DeSantis appointed Florida medical board members in establishing the Review. In addition to the main document outlining clinical recommendations, it also has several systematic reviews conducted by researchers from the University of York. The Review has been used to justify bans on puberty blockers in England, and has been cited in court cases restricting gender affirming care across the United States.

“The Review repeatedly misuses data and violates its own evidentiary standards by resting many conclusions on speculation. Many of its statements and the conduct of the York [systematic reviews] reveal profound misunderstandings of the evidence base and the clinical issues at hand,” says the paper. “The Review also subverts widely accepted processes for development of clinical recommendations and repeats spurious, debunked claims about transgender identity and gender dysphoria. These errors conflict with well-established norms of clinical research and evidence-based healthcare. Further, these errors raise serious concern about the scientific integrity of critical elements of the report’s process and recommendations.” The article is entitled “An Evidence-Based Critique of ‘The Cass Review’ on Gender-affirming Care for Adolescent Gender Dysphoria,” and is authored by Dr. Meredithe McNamara, Dr. Kellan Baker, Dr. Kara Connelly, Dr. Aron Janssen, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Dr. Ken C. Pang, Dr. Ayden Scheim, Dr. Jack Turban, and Dr. Anne Alstott. It was announced both by Turban in a post on Twitter, as well as on the Yale Law School’s website. Both McNamara and Alstott are professors at Yale who co-founded the Integrity Project, a project that aims to provide legal justice to marginalized peoples.

The core of the paper is divided into seven sections that each tackle a different element of the Review. The first section focuses on how the Review actually is compliant with established standards of care recommendations for providing legal protections for gender affirming care. The authors compare it to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) eighth rendition for standards of care and the Endocrine Society clinical practice guidelines, finding that recommendations for individualized and evidence based care are consistent across these different documents. The authors state, “the Review does not conclude that gender-affirming medical care for adolescent gender dysphoria should be banned. Thus, it should not be cited in support of bans on medical treatments for gender dysphoria.”

[...] This paper shines a new light on interpretations for the Cass Review, suggesting that it’s based on low quality work and has been falsely interpreted in legal proceedings across the world. The lack of expertise from Cass herself contrasts with the expertise of the authors of the paper, all of whom represent institutions across the world that have decades of research and clinical practice on transgender individuals. Legal decisions made using the Cass Review need to be reevaluated in light of the sweeping critiques found within this paper.

Yale Law School researchers wrote an article debunking the anti-trans Cass Review that has been used to justify bans on gender-affirming care in the UK and USA.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Chris Nesi

Published: Oct 23, 2024

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics — including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.

For the National Institutes of Health-funded study, researchers chose 95 kids — who had an average age of 11 — and gave them puberty-blocking drugs starting in 2015. The treatments are meant to delay the onset of bodily changes like the development of breasts or the deepening of the voice.

After following up with the youths for two years, the treatments did not improve the state of their mental health, which Olson-Kennedy chalked up to the kids being “in really good shape” both when they started and concluded the two-year treatment.

However, the Times points out that her rosy assessment contradicts earlier data recorded by the researchers which found around one-quarter of study participants “were depressed or suicidal” before receiving treatment.

The result also does not support the findings of a 2011 Dutch study, which is the primary scientific research cited by proponents of giving kids puberty blockers. That study of 70 kids found that children treated with puberty blockers reported better mental health and fewer behavioral and emotional problems.

Olson-Kennedy, the outlet points out, is one of the country’s leading advocates for providing gender-affirming care to adolescents, and regularly provides expert testimony in legal challenges to state bans on such procedures, which have taken root in more than 20 states.

When asked by the Times why the results have not been made public after nine years, she said, “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” adding, “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

She then flat-out admitted she was afraid the lack of mental health improvements borne out by the study could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

A Washington Post-KFF Trans in America survey found that 68% of US adults are against providing puberty blockers to trans-identifying youth ages 10 to 14, and 58% oppose hormone treatments for those ages 15 to 17.

Boston College clinical and research psychologist Amy Tishelman, who was one of the original researchers on the study, pointed out the obvious contradiction in withholding scientific evidence on the grounds that it doesn’t match an expected conclusion.

“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” she told the outlet.

“No change isn’t necessarily a negative finding — there could be a preventative aspect to it,” she said hopefully.

“We just don’t know without more investigation.”

Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist and a transgender youth expert, told The Post she was “shocked” and “disturbed” about the decision to withhold publication of such vital research.

“We’re craving information about these medical treatments for gender-questioning youth. Dr. Olson-Kennedy has the largest grant that’s ever been awarded in the US on the subject and is sitting on data that would be helpful to know,” she said.

“It’s not her prerogative to decide based on the results that she will or won’t publish them.”

She also wasn’t buying Olson-Kennedy’s rationale for holding back the study’s findings based on fear of backlash.

“It’s contrary to the scientific method. You do research, and then you disclose what the results are,” she said. 

“You don’t change them, you don’t distort them, and you don’t reveal or not reveal them based on the reactions of others. You report as scientists what you’ve learned.”

In a 2020 progress report submitted to the NIH, Olson-Kennedy hypothesized that study participants would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

Olson-Kennedy appeared to attempt to muddy the waters in her interview with the Times when explaining how her hypothesis didn’t pan out, claiming participants had “good mental health on average.”

She made this assertion “several times” despite saying previously that 25% of the study’s young patients were suffering with various mental illness symptoms before treatments began.

When pressed by the outlet for an explanation for the seemingly contradictory findings, Olson-Kennedy attributed it to “data averages,” and said she was “still analyzing the full data set.”

In April, England’s National Health Service disallowed puberty blockers for children following a four-year review conducted by independent researcher Dr. Hilary Cass, who wrote in her report that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”

Last year, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a leading Finnish expert on pediatric gender medicine, said in a newspaper interview that “four out of five” gender-questioning children will eventually grow out of it and accept their bodies even without medical intervention.

Olson-Kennedy did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.

==

"It doesn't matter that I accidentally proved my pseudoscientific snake-oil doesn't work, I still want to sell it."

[erebusvincent]

Destroying children’s bodies for the sake of adult (mostly but not exclusively male) paraphiliacs is Antichrist behavior.

Some of the biggest names in the pediatric gender medicine field are part of an entrenched global trend in which they prioritize the transgender advocacy mission over honest and direct science. They hide inconvenient research findings. And they seek to prevent other researchers from even asking questions that might yield inconvenient answers. Supporting them is a cabal of activists and LGBTQ nonprofits standing at the ready to bully and cancel any scientists or journalists who might bring to light any of the more questionable aspects of pediatric gender medicine.

This pattern is not just limited to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. If you haven’t already heard, according to reporting in The New York Times, this major leader in the pediatric gender medicine field has been sitting on null findings from her National Institutes of Health–funded study of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric children because, she said, publishing them would prove politically inexpedient. (I wrote about an undercover video of her talking about mastectomies here.)

Where have we heard this story before?

Let’s take a trip across the pond to the British National Health Service’s now-shuttered pediatric gender clinic, GIDS. (I encourage you to read all about this troubled clinic in Hannah Barnes’ book Time to Think. Make sure to get the new 2024 U.S. paperback, which has a viral new epilogue.) After it was founded in 2011, GIDS’s leaders sought to recreate the findings of the original Dutch protocol that was first cultivated in the mid-1990s and that ultimately gave rise to the global pediatric gender-transition treatment movement during the 2000s and 2010s.

But the British team failed. They did not find a substantial benefit from providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric children by following the Dutch protocol. So did these researchers alert the world to their troublesome findings? Did they send a word of caution to a field that by then was circumnavigating the globe, setting up what would soon be hundreds of pediatric gender-clinic outposts?

No, they kept their failure secret.

[the-eternal-quest-for-balance]

‘Perhaps the most influential youth gender-transition physician in America.’

The behavior of a researcher funded by the National of Institutes of Health, in hiding the results of a long-running study on the effects of puberty blockers on children, already has been called out by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

In his recent letter to NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, Rubio drew specific attention to an NIH-funded study by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Despite the Obama administration‘s decision to support Olson-Kennedy’s study more than nine years ago, the findings have yet to be released, allegedly out of fear of the political repercussions.

Rubio has charged that Olson-Kennedy was part of a group of researchers who received nearly $6 million from NIH to study physical and mental health outcomes for children who receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatments as part of “transitioning” to the opposite sex.

[dertaglichedan]

Woke doc refused to publish $10 million trans kids study that showed puberty blockers didn’t help mental health

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics – including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.

For the National Institutes of Health-funded study, researchers chose 95 kids — who had an average age of 11 — and gave them puberty blocking drugs starting in 2015. The treatments are meant to delay the onset of bodily changes like the development of breasts or the deepening of the voice.

After following up with the youths for two years, the treatments did not improve the state of their mental health, which Olson-Kennedy chalked up to the kids being “in really good shape” both when they started and concluded the two-year treatment.