DE-GLEICHSCHALTUNG* HAS BEGUN: America’s best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine is being sued. From Jesse Singal in the Economist:
As state-level bans on youth gender medicine have accumulated, and are being tested at the Supreme Court, this controversial field has been seized by a fierce debate over the proper role of mental-health assessments. The Dutch clinicians who published the seminal youth gender medicine protocol in 2012 emphasised the importance of conducting a careful, in-depth assessment prior to starting a young person on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. But Dr Olson-Kennedy has emerged as a critic of what she views as undue and unnecessary “gatekeeping”. “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin,” she told the Atlantic in 2018. In her published research, Dr Olson-Kennedy has reported prescribing cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 12, and referring patients as young as 13 for double mastectomies.
Now, however, Dr Olson-Kennedy is being sued by a former patient, Clementine Breen, who believes that she was harmed precisely by a lack of gatekeeping. And many of Ms Breen’s claims appear to be backed up by Dr Olson-Kennedy’s own patient notes, which Ms Breen and her legal team have shared with The Economist. The medical-negligence lawsuit was filed on December 5th in California.
Ms Breen is a 20-year-old drama student at UCLA whose treatment at Dr Olson-Kennedy’s clinic included puberty blockers at age 12, hormones at 13 and a double mastectomy at 14. She stopped taking testosterone for good about a year ago and then began detransitioning in March. The lawsuit’s defendants are Dr Olson-Kennedy, the gender therapist to whom Dr Olson-Kennedy referred her, the surgeon who performed the double mastectomy and 20 as-yet-unnamed “Doe Individuals” who were agents, servants, and employees of their co-defendants.” Ms Breen’s attorneys accuse them of medical negligence on a number of grounds, including an alleged lack of psychological assessment, poor management of Ms Breen’s mental health and a lack of concern about the effects of puberty blockers on Ms Breen’s bone health.
Why sue? One answer is that Ms Breen is seeking monetary damages. But she also cites “personal closure reasons” in an interview, as well as a desire to rebut the notion that rushed youth gender transitions are rare in America, a claim commonly made by some LGBT activists. “People are just brushing exactly what happened to me off as something that doesn’t happen,” she says.
J.K. Rowling tweets that Singal’s article “should be read by every single person arguing that minors aren’t being rushed or pushed into transition, that gender doctors know exactly what they’re doing, and that those with questions must be bigots driven by hatred.”
* As Ace warned in February, and likely even more so going forward, the establishment left will likely be breaking out the airbrushes on a Stalinist level: The Trans-Children Era is About to Be Memory-Holed and the Perpetrators Will Be Disavowing Involvement. Particularly since, as Rich Lowry wrote in November, “Trans Moralism Is Killing the Democrats.” “This is what happened on trans issues in the election. Donald Trump’s ‘she’s for they/them’ attack ad was the most effective and consequential political spot of this century.”
Earlier: Report: Corporate Executives Sit on Boards of Hospitals That Perform Child Sex Changes.