The Doctor Called and Said We Can’t Publish Studies That Don’t Fully Support Transitioning Kids

On Procrustean gender ideologues.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is one of the most aggressive advocates of normalizing “gender-affirming care” for minors, and she just admitted to suppressing a study on the effects of puberty blockers because the results did not support her mission to push these procedures on children.

Simply put, the data has not seen the light of day because it does not say what she wants it to say, and she remarkably confessed that to The New York Times. J.K. Rowling summed it up neatly in a tweet: “We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.”

Olson-Kennedy is a dyed-in-the-wool true believer. She’s president elect of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, and her record includes methodologically shoddy government-funded research that recommended mastectomies for minors and bragging about using the legal system to take kids away from “recalcitrant” parents who don’t want to transition their boys and girls. More on that later.

The study in question now began in 2015 “as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth,” The Times reported. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues gave 95 kids from across America blockers that stall the manifestation of secondary sex characteristics, like breasts in girls and deepening voices in boys. They wanted to prove that this is a surefire way to improve the mental health of youths who feel distressed and confused about their bodies.

The majority of these cases resolve themselves by puberty. Introducing blockers into the mix potentially complicates that.

A study from the Netherlands found that most trans-identifying participants “who started gender-affirming hormones in adolescence continued this treatment into adulthood.” So it seems there’s a decent chance that boys and girls who would otherwise grow up to be men and women are less likely to do that if they start blockers, which leads them further down the road of transitioning, with each step incurring increasingly irreversible consequences. For example, even if someone decides to desist at the hormone therapy stage, there’s not much they can do about side effects like infertility.

Importantly, and contrary to what many believe, blockers also can and do cause permanent damage. In one particularly awful case, a young girl developed osteoporotic levels of bone weakness after she started them. It is estimated that nearly 40 percent of total body bone mineral accrual in girls happens during the pubertal growth spurt. Blocking puberty also blocks this critical developmental phase.

The parents of the girl had been led to believe by doctors—people like Olson-Kennedy—that the effects would be reversible if she decided to desist. But this did not look easily undone. “I was furious,” the mother recalled to The Times. “I’m thinking, ‘I worry we’ve done permanent damage.’”