Last month LA Children’s Hospital announced that the Center for Transyouth Health and Development, the largest gender affirming care center in the country, would be shutting down.
Since then there have been weekly protests featuring the same small group of people. Two weeks ago KCAL, the CBS News affiliate in LA, published a story titled “Dozens protest Children’s Hospital LA decision to end gender-affirming care.”
Dozens of people protested outside Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and demanded that the medical center reverse its decision to shut down its gender-affirming programs.
“I have so many people who are being affected by this,” said teen Sage Pitchnik, who is transgender. “This place saved my life so many times. I wouldn’t be here without it.”
Today the Associated Press published a version of the same story titled “Protesters rally against closure of largest gender-affirming care center for kids in the U.S.” Apart from dropping the reference to “dozens” of protesters, it’s basically the same story.
Growing up, Sage Sol Pitchenik wanted to hide.
“I hated my body,” the nonbinary 16-year-old said. “I hated looking at it.”
When therapy didn’t help, Pitchenik, who uses the pronoun they, started going to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the country’s biggest public provider of gender-affirming care for children and teens. It changed their life…
“I’m one of the lucky ones,” said Pitchenik, who received hormone blockers after a lengthy process. “I learned how to not only survive but how to thrive in my own body because of the lifesaving health care provided to me right here at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.”
Lifesaving is doing a lot of work here as it always does in this argument. The implication is that if children don’t get this “care” they’ll kill themselves. More on that in a moment.
Eventually, the story does get around to explaining why the Center for Transyouth Health and Development is being shut down.
The hospital initially backed off its plans to close after it announced them in February, spurring demonstrations, but later doubled back.
The center said in a statement that “despite this deeply held commitment to supporting LA’s gender-diverse community, the hospital has been left with no viable path forward” to stay open.
“Center team members were heartbroken to learn of the decision from hospital leaders, who emphasized that it was not made lightly, but followed a thorough legal and financial assessment of the increasingly severe impacts of recent administrative actions and proposed policies,” the statement said.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has warned that by closing the center, the hospital is violating state antidiscrimination laws, but his office hasn’t taken any further actions.
The issues were both financial and legal. As mentioned, the hospital considered shutting it down back in February but California AG Rob Bonta sent a letter warning that doing so would violate state law. After receiving the letter the hospital reversed course. But then last month they took another look and decided to shut it down.
Not mentioned at all in the story is the Medical Director at the Center for Transyouth Health, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Dr. Olson-Kennedy made news last year when the NY Times revealed she had been sitting on research funded by $10 million in federal money because the outcome didn’t suit her.
The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.
The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.
This was an attempt to backstop the study that led to the “Dutch protocol” which later became gender-affirming care. The fact that Dr. Olson-Kennedy couldn’t replicate the results was a problem so she just sat on it. She told the Times, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.”
Dr. Olson-Kennedy wasn’t just any doctor, she was an outspoken doctor pushing gender-affirming care. She was testifying in court against state bans around the country. And she was explicitly arguing that failing to give kids what they wanted would lead to suicide.
Some doctors, citing the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior among trans youths, argued that failing to affirm a child’s expressed gender would put their life in danger. “We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the country’s leading gender physicians, told ABC News.
But two other things happened to Dr. Olson-Kennedy which may have had an impact on the decision to shutter the center. First, last December she was sued by one of her former patients. The claims made by this former patient, Clementine Breen, show she was rushed into hormone blockers almost immediately at age 13 without any counseling.
Dr Olson-Kennedy’s notes from that first visit show that she immediately set Ms Breen down a path towards medical transition. She writes that Ms Breen had not yet seen a gender therapist and had come out as trans three months earlier. Nevertheless, she asserts that Ms Breen meets the specific Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria for gender dysphoria, one of which, she writes, is a cross-sex identity that has lasted for six months or longer. A bit later Dr Olson-Kennedy asserts that Ms Breen also meets the criteria for the commencement of puberty blockers, including not “suffer[ing] from psychiatric comorbidity that interferes with the diagnostic work-up or treatment”. It is unclear how Dr Olson-Kennedy could have known that given that Ms Breen had not yet seen a psychologist about her gender dysphoria, and given that Dr Olson-Kennedy herself had performed no mental-health evaluation.
Breen’s legal complaint claims that Dr. Olson-Kennedy prescribed her testosterone. When Breen’s parents became concerned, Dr. Olson-Kennedy reportedly pulled them aside and warned that their 13-year-old daughter was suicidal and that if she didn’t get the hormone therapy she would kill herself. According to Clementine Breen, this was a lie, but it worked and her parents backed down. Breen would eventually discontinue testosterone and at age 20 she now looks back and thinks she never should have been put on this path starting at age 12.
All of that is at odds with how the AP frames what was going on at the Center for Transyouth Health:
Patients who haven’t gone through puberty yet receive counseling, which continues throughout the care process. For some patients, the next step is puberty blockers; for others, it’s also hormone replacement therapy. Surgeries are rarely offered to minors.
And notice the bits I put in bold above where a current patient “received hormone blockers after a lengthy process.” That may be true but the fact that the medical director of the center is being sued by someone specifically alleging this is not how the center operated in her case is never mentioned by the AP. Doesn’t that seem relevant, especially when the decision to shutter it is partially based on a review of it’s legal position?
The other fact that goes unmentioned her is that Dr. Olson-Kennedy finally published the research she had been sitting on for years.
The study, authored by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and colleagues and posted online before journal publication, found that depression symptoms in adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria “did not change significantly over 24 months” of being on puberty blockers…
Olson-Kennedy and her co-authors argue in the paper that, although the patients’ mental health remained stable during the study period, “it is likely that puberty blockers prevent the deterioration of mental health.”
Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director for the advocacy group Do No Harm, which advocates against youth gender transitions, told the Washington Examiner that the research team’s conclusion “resembles a hypothesis rather than a definitive finding.”
“A clear acknowledgment of their data would reveal that puberty blockers offer no mental health benefit. Despite this, the release of these results had been delayed for years,” Miceli said. “The full study once again demonstrates a lack of high-quality evidence supporting the so-called ‘affirming’ model.”
So her own study found no evidence of improved outcomes. Again, that seems relevant if you’re running a center founded on the idea that gender-affirming care is necessary to reduce depression symptoms that could lead to suicide. But again, the AP doesn’t mention it. Instead we get the testimony of a teenager.
The AP has presented a very one-sided story here which fails to consider why other countries in Europe have moved away from the gender-affirming model this center represents. I’m not surprised the AP is toeing the liberal line on this issue, but they really ought to make some effort to give readers the full picture.
