JOHANNA OLSON-KENNEDY is among the most celebrated youth gender medicine clinicians in the world.
“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.
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.
Ms Breen’s story starts early in the 2016-17 school year, when she turned 12. She felt depressed and sought help from a guidance counsellor. “I mentioned that I might be trans,” she recalled in the interview, “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.” In retrospect, she said, she believes that her unsettled feelings about going through puberty stemmed from a violent situation at home involving her older brother, who has severe autism, as well as sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of someone outside the family when she was six years old, which she did not disclose to anyone until much later.