America's top trans doc for kids sued by California student ushered into sex change at 12-years-old

Dr. Johana Olson-Kennedy is at the top of the heap of gender doctors for trans kids and now she's facing a lawsuit from a young woman who says Olson-Kennedy did not follow gatekeeping safeguards and pushed her into irreversible trans treatment at the age of 12, the effects of which are now making her life hell. Clementine Breen has a deep voice, an Adam's apple, no breasts, brittle bones, and plenty of scars both physical and mental. The suit also alleges that Olson-Kennedy, who offers a gender clinic at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, "misrepresented" her "gender identity history" when referring her for surgery. Olson-Kennedy had said in that letter that Breen had "endorsed a male gender identity since childhood," which Breen disputes. Olson-Kennedy has treated thousands of children and teens and claims that trans identity can be known at the low age of 2-years-old.

Breen was only 12 years old when she started her sex change. The puberty blockers were intended to prevent her from going through natural, female puberty, cross-sex hormones were then prescribed to push her body into male puberty, thereby making her appear more masculine. The puberty blocking drugs have a side-effect of making bones brittle, a consequence Breen now says she was not warned about. At 13 she was prescribed testosterone that deepened her voice and caused her to develop a pronounced Adam's apple. At only 14-years-old, both of her breasts were removed by a surgeon referred by Olson-Kennedy. At the age of 19, Breen stopped taking the drugs and began the long process of returning to live as a woman.

Now a drama student at UCLA, she asserts that Olson-Kennedy was negligent, should never have shuttled her into the trans pipeline, did not ensure that there was a psychological assessment before drugging her, told her parents that Breen was suicidal—though Breen says she was not, and that Olson-Kennedy did not inform her of about the really harmful effects the medical sex change would have on her body. In 2017, Olson-Kennedy said that it was "ridiculous" that health insurance companies would require "mental health NOTEs and signed consents prior to covering blockers." She said that it was important for advocates of trans medicine to "eradicate gatekeeper letters as a requirement for care."

Breen is also suing therapist Susan P. Landon, who when discussing trans youth, said "You’re assigned a particular name for a particular body. The problem with that is that you then are expected to become what that body represents, which to our binary society is a boy or a girl." In defense of the notion that children can change sex, she has said that "gender identity doesn't have a test. It is a felt feeling inside" and that this "felt feeling" and a child's biological sex "have nothing to do with each other."

"I mentioned that I might be trans," Breen said in an interview, recalling the beginning of her transition story in 2016-17, when Olson-Kennedy was actively flouting the need for mental health "gatekeeping" for trans-identified teens. Breen, speaking to a guidance counselor, said that she "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." Even so, the next step was for the counselor to call Breen's parents and tell them that their daughter was trans. Her parents did the dutiful thing of seeking treatment, taking their child to the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, the home of Olson-Kenney's gender clinic.

Breen met with Olson-Kennedy in December 2016. Jesse Signal, who broke the story in The Economist, said that per Olson-Kennedy's notes, "she immediately set Ms. Breen down a path towards medical transition." This despite the fact that Breen "had not yet seen a gender therapist and had come out as trans three months earlier."

In a talk, Olson-Kennedy has defended child sex changes, or what she calls "gender confirmation surgery in minors", saying "the idea that a 14 or 15 year old would want a vagina if they identified as a girl is really not that out there, it's really understandable." She went on to say "surgery, chest surgery for trans guys as minors is critical. And it's available. It's not nearly as difficult as gender reconstruction because it doesn't have anything to do with sterilization. The difficulty of genital surgery is that it is surgical sterilization and people get super worked up about that and that is the barrier we have to overcome. But chest surgery is not that, it's a very easy, safe relatively fast procedure that is absolutely lifesaving."

Cole is not the only young woman who has experienced long-lasting side-effects of breast removal. Other young women who have undergone double mastectomies, or as Olson-Kennedy calls it coolly "chest surgery for trans guys," have come away with gaping wounds, rotting flesh, and sepsis as a result. 

Olson-Kennedy has long been an opponent of so-called "gatekeeping" for trans youth. She has said that if teen girls have their breasts removed and come to regret it they can just get new ones later—a prospect Breen is now forced to consider if she wants to have a female shape. When discussing the double mastectomies of 13-year-old girls, Olson-Kennedy said, "If you want breasts at a later stage in your life, you can go and get them." Other young women who have gone through gender transition have also found the lack of breasts to be a problem once they realize that they are women and will never be men. 

Prisha Mosely, who had both of her breasts removed, has had immense difficulty reconciling that with motherhood—she is unable to nurse her child. Mosely has also brought suit against her doctors in North Carolina. She has alleged that they are guilty of "seven counts of fraud, facilitating fraud, breach of fiduciary duty rising to the level of constructive fraud, civil conspiracy, medical malpractice, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and unfair and deceptive trade practices." That suit was cleared to move forward in the spring of 2024 and is making its way through the courts.

"They told me that changing my body to look like a boy’s body would cure my mental health problems," Mosely said, writing about the experience. "They told me that injecting large amounts of testosterone into my female body would be good for me. They also encouraged me to undergo surgery to remove my healthy breasts."

Chloe Cole has also spoken out against gender transition for minors, and she too had her breasts removed as a young girl. She has traveled the country to warn not just young people but their parents against sex changes for children and teens. She has said that her parents, too, were coerced into believing that medical sex change was the best thing they could do for their daughter. Medical and health care professionals, Cole said, told her parents that she would kill herself if she wasn't allowed to go through with the change. But that wasn't true, and after the surgery, Cole found herself ashamed to be thinking about presenting as female and wore women's clothes in secret, unsure as to how to get out of the mess she was in.

Breen said that her parents were told by Olson-Kennedy that she was suicidal. That came after her parents said they were worried about the administration of testosterone to their teen daughter. Breen said that Olson-Kennedy took her parents aside. Per the complaint: "Dr Olson-Kennedy first told them that Clementine was suicidal. At that time, Clementine had never had any thoughts of suicide, and she certainly had never expressed anything along those lines to Dr Olson-Kennedy. Dr Olson-Kennedy went even further [...] by telling them that if they did not agree to cross-sex hormone therapy, Clementine would commit suicide."

Olson-Kennedy's notes, however, contradict this. They say, per Signal, that when she prescribed the testosterone and described Breen's mental state, she wrote "Alert… No acute distress… Cooperative, Smiling." Threats of suicide are one of the key ways that parents are convinced to go along with sex changes for their children. Often, medical professionals will ask "do you want a dead daughter or a living son?" Any parent would prefer that their child be alive, in near any condition, rather than lost forever. Cole's parents were asked these questions, too.

In the recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of the US v Skrmetti, in which the Tennessee law banning sex changes for minors was challenged by both the Biden-Harris Department of Justice and the ACLU, the concept of suicide among trans youth was brought up. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, who is trans, argued that this was a real concern, though when pressed, could not point to definitive studies showing that trans teens who do not undergo treatment are at a higher risk of taking their own lives. 

There have also been indications that undergoing sex change is also exceedingly mentally taxing and causes distress to the point of suicidality. Signal notes that "the evidence that cross-sex hormones ameliorate suicidality is thin: in a 2021 systematic review on the effects of cross-sex hormones on trans people commissioned by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, the authors write that due to a lack of quality published research, 'We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.'"

Breen did feel a bit better after the testosterone, but that's simply a side-effect of testosterone: it boosts confidence and makes people feel a bit invincible. She said that high quickly crashed.

For Olson-Kennedy, allowing a minor to go through natural puberty after that minor has said they are trans is a horror. In a 2014 video promoting her children's gender clinic, she said "So for those young kids who are starting puberty and have strong gender identities that don't match their bodies, those young people can really benefit from not ever going through the wrong puberty the first time," she said. The idea is that children who wish to be the opposite sex will be "saved" from their natal sex if they grow up more closely resembling the opposite sex. 

"It's much easier if we can halt their puberty early on in the process and let them be suspended for a little bit and then put them through the right puberty that corresponds to their brain. This is what we do over in our program," she continued. "If we get kids early enough in the process, we put them on puberty blockers or medications that actually keep their body from progressing through that wrong puberty," she said, noting that they can then start taking cross-sex hormones when ready. Perhaps she thought she was helping Breen by stopping her from going through female puberty at all, assuming that the way she felt at 12-year-old was the way she would feel for her whole life.

However, it has been revealed by another doctor who deals with child sex changes, one who operated on famous trans child Jazz Jennings, that children who go on puberty blockers prior to the formative stage of puberty and then onto cross-sex hormones will never have a normal sex life. "An observation that I had," said Dr. Marci Bowers, a biological male who identifies as transgender and transitioned as an adult, "every single child who was, or adolescent, who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2," the beginning of puberty, "has never experienced orgasm. I mean, it's really about zero."

Olson-Kennedy is not stranger to minimizing the risks of sex changes for minors. In 2015, she refused to publish the results of a long-awaited study on the use of puberty blockers for minors—one of the drugs that was prescribed to Breen. Olson-Kennedy didn't publish the results because she thought there could be "political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states." The study began in 2015, with 95 children, and was part of a $9.7 millions federal project on trans youth, intended to study the effects of puberty blockers. Researchers tracked the children for two years to see how they were impacted.

After it was discovered that she refused to publish the results, she told The New York Times that the findings did not show that puberty blockers led to mental health improvements for her subjects. To her, this was because they were already doing great. "They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years," she said. This was not the first time Olson-Kennedy tried to cover up negative associations with medical sex changes. She also tried to squash the airing of a 60 Minutes segment that brought child sex changes under the microscope. 

Breen, Signal said, is not only looking for accountability but for some closure, to move past what happened to her. He reported that Breen had ditched testosterone, the "gender affirming" therapist Olson-Kennedy recommended, and is trying to sort out what happened to her in terms of her transition and what led up to it, with a new therapist. She said that if she had more mental health support when she was 12, and was able to discuss the sexual abuse she suffered as a child as well as her relationship with her autistic brother, she never would have embarked on the road to medical gender transition. It is that support that she alleges Olson-Kenney did not provide. 

Signal effectively faced cancellation when he wrote about detranistioners in 2018 in The Atlantic. For investigating incidents of trans regret, Signal was blasted as transphobic, ostracized, insulted and vilified. The Atlantic ran articles to contradict Signal amid backlash, with headlines such as "I Detransitioned. But Not Because I Wasn't Trans." Slate claimed that Signal had "disregarded inconvenient accounts from trans people—and in the absence of these voices, he is responding to a strawman." Now, those "strawmen" have lawyers and they are fighting back.