Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Accused of Bamboozling Girl into Transitioning to Male while a Preteen

Trying to turn a physically healthy girl into a boy is arguably an abnegation of nature.

So it is not surprising that doctors, psychologists and school officials resort to chicanery and badgering to foist irreversible medical procedures on confused kids who really are not afflicted with gender dysphoria but are often just suffering from a host of unrelated mental health issues.

Now, 20-year-old Kayla Clementine Breen,  is suing the leading practitioner of transgender youth medicine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for bamboozling her into transitioning to male while a preteen and foisting testosterone, puberty blockers and a double mastectomy on her. The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy,  even lied to Breen’s parents and said she was suicidal in order to convince them to approve testosterone injections.

Breen’s medical negligence lawsuit against Olson-Kennedy and other practitioners  who tried to transition her into a boy starting at age 12 paints a harrowing portrait of adults preying on a vulnerable young girl who was improperly labeled transgender when she was merely confused.

“This case is about a team of purported health care providers who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health struggles and suffering from multiple instances of sexual abuse should be prescribed a series of life-altering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, ultimately, receive a double mastectomy at the age of 14,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the Los Angeles County division of California Superior Court.

Breen’s case is being handled by Harmeet Dhillon’s Center for American Liberty, as well as lawyers from Limandri and Jonna in Rancho Santa Fe, California and Campbell Miller Payne in Dallas, Texas. (Dhillon was just nominated on December 10th  by President-elect Donald Trump to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.)

Jordan Campbell, one of Breen’s lawyers, told the California Globe that Breen wants people to know she is not an outlier and her story should prove a cautionary tale.  “What’s at stake in this lawsuit is achieving justice for Clementine and holding her purported medical providers accountable for the irreparable harm they’ve done to her,” he emailed. “To the extent there is anything more that this lawsuit may achieve, Clementine simply wants people to know that her story is not an outlier and that what happened to her is happening to other vulnerable youths. If her story and this lawsuit can prevent it from happening to other similarly vulnerable kids in the future, then that would be a win in and of itself.”

He added that “this scenario of fast-tracking vulnerable kids and their parents—through emotional manipulation and misrepresentation (ie “would you rather have a living son or dead daughter”)—into life altering “gender-affirming” medicalization is far more common than most people realize. We have heard from myriad individuals and families that have sadly similar stories. “

Johanna Olson-Kennedy was just in the news recently for trying to hide the downsides of so-called gender affirming care.  She confessed to the New York Times to not publishing the results of a 1o million dollar  federally funded study on puberty blockers because the study found they did not improve the mental health of patients.

Breen is now a drama student at UCLA. She is considering breast reconstruction surgery but is stuck with a deep voice and worried that the testosterone she was given is going to affect her future fertility.

The lawsuit says she suffered sexual abuse at a young age and suffered from all sorts of mental health issues, including PTSD and depression, as a result. But all that was disregarded as she was quickly typecast as transgender by school officials and doctors.

At the age of 11 she “began struggling with the thought of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier if she were a boy,” the lawsuit says. When she expressed these thoughts to a school counselor the counselor told her “that she was transgender and called her parents to tell them the same.”

Her parents took her to Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. That is when the real railroading started.

Olson-Kennedy almost instantly pronounced Breen as transgender without proper evaluation.

“Dr. Olson-Kennedy and the team at LA Children’s immediately and unquestioningly “affirmed” Clementine as transgender, and at her very first visit, after mere minutes, Dr. OlsonKennedy diagnosed Clementine with gender dysphoria and recommended surgical implantation of puberty blockers,” the lawsuit says. “Dr. Olson-Kennedy performed no mental health assessment. She did not ask about things like past trauma, abuse, or mental health struggles or diagnoses. She involved no other providers or health care professionals in this purported gender dysphoria diagnosis and recommendation for puberty blockers. Instead, she simply took a handful of platitudinal statements from a scared, confused, and traumatized barely-12-year-old girl to give a life-altering diagnosis and handed her the prescription pad. In short, it took Dr. Olson-Kennedy and the team at LA Children’s a single visit to send Clementine down a life-altering, traumatic, body-disfiguring, and irreversibly damaging path of transgender medicalization.”

“Under Defendants’ “care,” from the ages of 12 to 19, Clementine had a puberty blocker surgically inserted into her left arm at age 12, was prescribed “gender-affirming” cross-sex  hormones from ages 13 to 19, had a “gender-affirming” double mastectomy at only 14 years old, and was urged to get a “gender-affirming” hysterectomy as a 17-year-old.”

These treatments only made her mental afflictions worse.

 “She did not experience any long-term relief from these gender dysphoria “treatments.” Rather, her mental health progressively declined, as she proceeded into depression, anxiety, psychosis, hallucinations, self-harm, and suicidal ideation and even attempted suicide, none of which she had experienced prior to her gender medicalization.”

The lawsuit says the treatments that Olson-Kennedy forced on Breen were couched in lies and deceit and amounted to medical fraud and malpractice.

“Dr. Olson-Kennedy pushed Clementine and her parents down this transition path by engaging in intentional, malicious, and false representations and oppressive concealment of important information,” the lawsuit says. “This concealment included, among other things, the lack of adequate clinical research supporting this treatment, particularly for 12-year-old girls for treating gender dysphoria; the existence of higher-quality clinical research contra-indicating treatment; the 80-90% desistence rates for childhood gender dysphoria; and the significant possibility of detransition and regret. She misled not just Clementine but also her parents by stating that taking histrelin was akin to pushing pause on puberty and would give Clementine time to explore her gender identity. She described puberty blockers as “completely reversible” to both Clementine and her parents, an outright lie. She failed to list known risks and possible harms of taking puberty blockers.”

But finally after years of abuse by Olson-Kennedy Breen saw a new mental health counselor and started to detransition.

The lawsuit recounts how “Eventually, through mental health care she began receiving at the end of high school and the natural desistance of gender dysphoria as one progresses into adulthood, Clementine realized that she was not “trans.” She was a vulnerable child suffering from untreated PTSD from traumatic events in her childhood. Consequently, she detransitioned and no longer identifies as a male. But the damage has been done, and it is profound. As a result of Defendants’ so-called “gender-affirming care,” Clementine now has deep physical and emotional wounds, severe regrets, and distrust of the  medical system. She has suffered physically, socially, neurologically, and psychologically. Her voice has permanently deepened. Her female body did not develop, and she has a very masculine body structure. Her fertility is almost certainly destroyed from the combination of years on puberty blockers and testosterone. And even if she could conceive and deliver a child, she would not be able to breastfeed because her healthy breasts were removed when she was only 14.”

Lorenzo Benet, director of public relations for Children’s  Hospital Los Angeles, where Olson-Kennedy has her clinic, did not reply to a request for comment.