As Olson-Kennedy Falls, So Goes Pediatric Transition
From Red Scare to gender"care": a reckoning begins
Update: June 12, 2025
It was announced today that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles will shutter its longstanding healthcare program for trans children and young adults this summer.
In the early 1950s, the United States was gripped by a wave of fear known as the “Red Scare.” As post-World War II alliances crumbled and the Soviet Union emerged as a formidable rival, high-profile espionage cases involving figures like Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg fueled widespread paranoia. No one is more associated with the Red Scare of the 1950s than Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. As a prominent figure in the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he led an aggressive crusade against alleged communists and sympathizers, using unsubstantiated accusations to target Hollywood studios, government officials, and others. In his fervor to root out the “reds,” he shattered democratic norms, left a trail of ruined reputations and civil liberties violations, and created the pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and conformity now known as the “McCarthy era.” Though he was far from the only zealot, he was so closely identified with the movement that his fate and that of the cause were completely intertwined—as McCarthy went, so went his cause.
Americans have been living through a similar period of conformism when it comes to trans ideology, in which we have been told that “people are who they say they are,” even, and perhaps especially, if they are gender-distressed children or adolescents. No one has been more vocal in favor of pediatric transition than Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Like McCarthy, one figure has come to symbolize this movement’s excesses.
Who is Johanna Olson-Kennedy?
While she is not the only proponent of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents, she is arguably the most influential. She is the Medical Director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she has overseen the medical transition of approximately 1,400 youth aged 3 to 25. She is President-Elect of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH), the U.S. counterpart of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Her research and opinions have influenced both organizations and the Endocrine Society. Her maxim, “children know who they are,” and infamous question, “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” are deployed in gender clinics across the nation. Now that long-silenced critics of the so-called “affirmative” model—a model prioritizing immediate affirmation of a child’s gender identity over psychological evaluation—and detransitioners harmed by these interventions are finally getting a hearing, Olson-Kennedy, the face of child-led transition, faces a reckoning. Her research is being exposed for not supporting her claims about the benefits of pediatric care, her child-led approach is being questioned in a new documentary podcast, and she faces a malpractice lawsuit.
She has been in the spotlight this week, and not in a favorable way. Her long-suppressed study on puberty blockers has finally been released into preprint, and she features prominently in an episode of The Protocol, The New York Times’ podcast about the Dutch Protocol, which has sparked debate among clinicians. The study shows that there is no evidence to back up the claim that puberty blockers improve the mental health of young people treated with them, and she doesn’t come across well in the podcast. Adding to these challenges, she faces a significant malpractice lawsuit from a former patient, Clementine Breen. Could her troubles be the beginning of the end for childhood transition? Let’s look at the story so far.
A Study Suppressed
Olson-Kennedy has been publishing on the subject of gender and minors since 2011. Her most recent study, Mental and Emotional Health of Youth after 24 Months of Gender-Affirming Medical Care Initiated with Pubertal Suppression, published in pre-print on May 16, 2025, has been a long time coming. Expected in 2020, the study was funded by a $9.7 million NIH grant as part of the Trans Youth Care United States Study (TYCUS) and was supposed to provide definitive evidence for gender-affirming care.1 As part of study she followed 94 transgender and non-binary youth over two years but found no significant mental health benefits from the use of puberty blockers. Specifically, the data showed that 25% of participants had baseline depression or suicidality, contradicting her 2020 NIH report’s claim that participants were “in really good shape.”
Olson-Kennedy’s excuses for not publishing sooner—ongoing data analysis and alleged funding cuts (denied by the NIH)—lack credibility. She admitted in a New York Times interview on October 23, 2024, that she feared critics would “weaponize” the findings to argue, “We shouldn’t use [puberty] blockers because it doesn’t impact them.” This delay, enabled by the NIH’s policy of leaving it to researchers to decide how and when to publish their work, as reported in the Washington Times, has allowed an unproven narrative of mental health benefits to persist, shaping treatment for thousands. Dr. Hilary Cass, whose 2024 UK review exposed the lack of evidence for mental health benefits from blockers, criticized such delays for misleading clinicians and families.
Broken Protocol
The Protocol is a six-part New York Times podcast series exploring the history and controversies surrounding medical treatment for gender-distressed youth. Olson-Kennedy appears in the third episode, which looks at how the protocol evolved in the United States. Though ultimately flawed the Dutch at least tried to vet their patients., screening for mental health issues. By contrast, Olson-Kennedy pushed for fewer barriers to transition. Unfortunately for her, she is positioned opposite Laura Edwards-Leeper, the clinician at Boston Children’s Hospital, which opened the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States in 2007. Edwards-Leeper expressed concern about a shift that occurred around 2014, when the population of gender-distressed youth began to change. As she describes it, “People were suddenly seeming to feel like it needed to be child-led entirely, and that there could never be complicating factors that needed to be looked at, that it can never be because someone experienced a traumatic event, or they’re just fed up with what’s expected of them as an assigned female.” Olson-Kennedy was at the forefront of this shift. She is unapologetic about eliminating assessments she sees as gatekeeping, even suggesting that therapists working with youth seeking to transition are, in her view, only conducting sessions to “make [themselves] feel comfortable about the gender that the young person is asserting.” The podcast then plays a clip in which she explains, “We often will ask parents, would you rather have a dead son or an alive daughter?” Like McCarthy’s overreach with baseless accusations, her dismissal of caution has drawn widespread criticism.
The Truth Will Out—In Court
The question—really a threat—that a child will commit suicide if they aren’t affirmed has become the weapon of choice for clinicians seeking to silence parents who express doubts about their child’s medical transition. The accusation that Olson-Kennedy used coercive tactics to gain parental consent is one of the central allegations in a lawsuit filed in December 2024 on behalf of Clementine Breen, now 20. Like McCarthy’s public hearings, which exposed his tactics to scrutiny, this lawsuit is bringing Olson-Kennedy’s practices into the open.
The complaint alleges medical negligence stemming from a single 2016 consultation when Breen was 12. Olson-Kennedy reportedly diagnosed gender dysphoria, recommended puberty blockers, and misrepresented them as “completely reversible,” despite risks like bone density loss and infertility. Ignoring Breen’s anxiety and depression, she allegedly used manipulative tactics, such as asking Breen’s parents the fateful question, “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?”—this, despite Breen having no suicidal history. Her worried parents consented, and their daughter was given blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14. Breen, who detransitioned at 18, now faces irreversible consequences, including infertility, chronic pain, and psychological distress, alleging that Olson-Kennedy dismissed therapy in favor of rapid medicalization.
Above: Olson-Kennedy in a leaked video from a "Professional Symposium" convened by "Gender Spectrum", 6 July 2018, Moraga, California.
It is hard to see how Olson-Kennedy will survive when she has been so outspoken in the past. For instance, a leaked video (above) shows Olson-Kennedy making light of the possibility of regret after a double mastectomy by saying that girls who miss having breasts can simply “go get them.” But the stakes are much higher than a single lawsuit.
Olson-Kennedy’s rejection of “gatekeeping,” her advocacy for rapid transitions for the very young, and her blithe dismissal of the permanent changes and complications brought about by these interventions have set the tone for a generation of gender clinicians. Her fate is inextricably bound up with pediatric transition itself. Her own research, the 2024 Cass Review, and the May, 2025 HHS comprehensive report on treatments for gender dysphoria care show that it never delivered the promised mental health benefits and that it carries significant risks, including infertility and cognitive impairment. Countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and France have restricted or rolled back such interventions for minors, citing weak evidence and growing concerns from detransitioners. Eighteen U.S. states have now banned the use of puberty blockers outright for the same reasons, and a further six have partial bans in place. Let’s hope her decline signals a shift toward evidence-based care.
Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.
Join Genspect in Recognizing the Importance of Puberty
Since 2021, Genspect has exposed the harms of medical transition in young people and advocated for ethical, non-medicalized approaches to gender-related distress. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the Role of Puberty transforms this advocacy into collective action—uniting organizations worldwide to publicly commit to protecting children from experimental interventions that disrupt their natural development. To learn more about supporting MoU visit ProtectingPuberty.com
The grant was to study 2 cohorts of patients. Cohort A is made up of 315 who were administered “gender affirming care” and cohort B was made up of 95 who were administered puberty blockers. Two papers have been published relating to the first cohort (Chen et. a1 2023; Olson-Kennedy et. al 2025). The second paper referred to in this article relates to Cohort B has been published in pre-print, which means that it has not been peer-reviewed.
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The LA Children's Hospital Clinic closed today!
Thanks for this excellent article. I fervently hope Olson-Kennedy gets her just desserts (aplenty, and asap). And now— what of the AMA and the AAP— what will it take for their GAC policies to fall?