(LifeSiteNews) – A prominent pro-LGBT doctor has been refusing to release the findings of a federally funded “transgender youth” study she began in 2015 because the results did not match the conclusions she hoped for, according to an explosive report in The New York Times.
The Times reported that Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Trans Youth Health & Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, “recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers,” then “followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health.” She told the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that she expected to find that the kids would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”
However, the study did not show the children doing better than they started. “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,” the Times says. “Eight percent reported a past suicide attempt.”
In an interview with the Times, Olson-Kennedy attempted to argue that the children’s starting point actually wasn’t so bad after all, and therefore the lack of change was not concerning: “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years.” On follow-up, she claimed her “good shape” comment was referring to data averages, and her conclusion about the full data was still pending.
Regardless, in the nine years since the study commenced, Olson-Kennedy has still yet to publish any of the data for outside observers to analyze for themselves, which she justified by claiming, “I do not want our work to be weaponized. It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
Olson-Kennedy fears the study’s results could be cited by critics of pediatric sex “change” in court cases. She doesn’t seem to think that, as a medical researcher and clinician, her primary responsibility is to her current and future patients.
Doctors as agents of lawfare. pic.twitter.com/017CsDaym6
— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) October 23, 2024
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin considering arguments about the permissibility of state laws prohibiting the gender “transitioning”” of minors.