(The Center Square) – A 20-year-old student filed a lawsuit against the chief doctor at a Los Angeles gender clinic that gave her a double mastectomy at 14 and removal of her uterus at 17, citing medical negligence.
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at CHLA — the second-largest provider of child medical gender reassignment interventions and largest youth gender clinic in the country — also recently withheld publication of her $10 million CHLA study finding no improvement in mental health for children receiving puberty blocker sex change hormones.
Insurance claims data from Do No Harm says at least 2,084 California children received gender reassignment procedures between 2019-23. California requires that insurance — including taxpayer-financed Medi-Cal — cover “gender affirming care.”
The complaint alleges that doctors should not have prescribed Kaya Clementine Breen, a female, with “irreversibly damaging” puberty blockers at age 12, cross-sex hormones at age 13, and a double mastectomy at age 14. The complaint says Breen has a “complex, multi-faceted array of mental health symptoms” and is a “a survivor of multiple instances of sexual abuse as a child and adolescent” that was “never explored, addressed, or discussed by [the gender doctors] in the course of her “treatment.”
Once brought to CHLA, Dr. Olson-Kennedy allegedly diagnosed Breen with gender dysphoria and recommended surgical implantation of puberty blockers “after mere minutes,” with “no mental health assessment,” such as questions about mental health, trauma, or abuse, and “involved no other providers or health care professionals.”
The lawsuit says after receiving these “treatments,” Breen’s “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.”
Olson-Kennedy allegedly “never discussed nor attempted to treat Clementine with psychotherapy or other less-invasive options to address Clementine’s existing comorbidities and past trauma (about which she never asked).”
Breen’s complaint says doctors never secured “informed consent,” which her lawyers define as being told the “known and unknown risks” and the long-term consequences, “such as the loss of the ability to ever conceive a child or breastfeed one,” and the exploration of alternative treatment options, and evidence regarding the proposed treatment.
Breen’s lawyers allege that not only was informed consent not secured, but that the doctors “obscured and concealed important information” such as the “significant health risks associated with a female taking high doses of harmful male hormone drugs,” and even lied, saying the puberty blockers are “completely reversible” and that Breen “would commit suicide if she did not begin taking testosterone.”
CHLA told PBS it has provided gender treatments to children as young as three years old. CHLA has a partnership with Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the nation, to direct students to its gender clinic.
CHLA has “provided high quality, age-appropriate, medically necessary care for more than 30 years,” said CHLA spokesperson Lorenzo Benet in a statement. “Treatment is patient- and family-centered, following guidelines from professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Endocrine Society.”