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A prominent doctor and trans rights activist is being sued for allegedly pushing a pre-teen into transitioning and for falsely telling her parents she was suicidal to get them to agree to hormone therapy, according to a report.
Clementine Breen, now 20, filed a medical negligence lawsuit against Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy Thursday, claiming she was rushed into irreversible treatment to become male starting at age 12 without proper psychological testing and monitoring of her mental health and the side-effects of the treatment, according to a report by the Economist.
Olson-Kennedy – the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles – came under fire in October after she admitted she refused to publish the findings of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study showing that puberty blockers didn’t improve the mental health of kids.
Breen’s suit claims Olson-Kennedy’s clinic put her on puberty blockers when she was just 12, started her on hormone therapy at 13 and performed a double mastectomy on her at 14, the outlet reported, citing the suit and an interview with Breen.
Now, Breen wants to reverse the gender transition but is stuck with certain changes for life despite no longer wanting them, like a lower-than-normal voice, an Adam’s Apple and potential infertility after taking testosterone for so long.
She is also considering breast reconstruction surgery.
Breen – who studies drama at UCLA – said she wanted to file the lawsuit to bring awareness to a lack of gatekeeping in youths seeking to transition.
“People are just brushing exactly what happened to me off as something that doesn’t happen,” she says.In Breen’s case, she said she approached a guidance counselor at her school in 2016 when she was 12, expressing she might be trans, a lesbian or bisexual.
“I wasn’t really sure about my identity at all,” she told the outlet, noting she now believes she had unresolved trauma from violence at the hands of her autistic brother and sexual abuse from someone outside the family at age 6.
Despite Breen’s uncertainty about her identity, the counselor called her parents notifying them their daughter was transgender, prompting the parents to take her to Olson-Kennedy’s clinic by December 2016.
The doctor’s notes show that Breen hadn’t seen a psychologist about her feelings which were only voiced three months earlier.
But that didn’t stop the doctor from immediately putting Breen on the road to gender transition, the suit claims.
And at one point when the parents said they were concerned about putting their child on testosterone, the doctor said Breen was suicidal, despite the fact that the pre-teen hadn’t had suicidal thoughts or expressed them.
Still, Olson-Kennedy allegedly told them “if they did not agree to cross-sex hormone therapy, Clemtine would commit suicide,” the court papers allege.
