When Clementine Breen began getting puberty blockers at age 12, she had no idea she was agreeing to become a lifelong patient.
Breen, now a 20-year-old detransitioner, filed a lawsuit last Thursday against prominent child-gender specialist Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, alleging medical negligence.
Breen says Olson-Kennedy pushed her into irreversible transgender medical interventions at only 12 without proper psychological testing or monitoring of her mental health and the side effects of hormone regimens.
“I think telling me that the only treatment for my body issues was transitioning was kind of the worst thing for me, because in retrospect, I just have PTSD,” Breen told The Daily Signal. “I just needed treatment for what happened to me when I was a kid.”
Breen, currently a student at University of California-Los Angeles, not only began taking puberty blockers at 12 and testosterone at 13; she then had “top surgery”—a double mastectomy—at 14.
When she was 12, Breen went to her school guidance counselor to discuss negative feelings about her body. She didn’t know that her history as a victim of sexual abuse could be causing her discomfort with her identity as a woman.
“I was sexually assaulted when I was really young,” she said in an interview, “so I had a lot of like negative feelings about being a girl and being female. When I first expressed those feelings and looked for answers about that online, the first thing that came up was gender dysphoria and possible gender incongruence.”
Breen and the school guidance counselor reached the conclusion that she was transgender. But the counselor told her parents and teachers before she was sure that was the identity she wanted to claim, Breen said.
Breen’s parents took her to see Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The hospital told The Daily Signal it does not “comment on pending litigation; and out of respect for patient privacy and in compliance with state and federal laws, we do not comment on specific patients and/or their treatment.”
Although Breen said her parents expected Olson-Kennedy to conclude that their daughter wasn’t transgender, since Breen experienced no gender dysphoria as a child, the doctor immediately affirmed that the preteen was a boy.
“At first it was a lot of surface-level questions about how I fit in and how I felt with my peers and how I felt about being a girl and what I wanted my future to look like,” Breen said. “I had so many negative feelings about being a girl, so I felt weirdly very validated when [Olson-Kennedy] told me that there was a very clear diagnosis of something physically wrong with my body and that it wasn’t me that was the problem.”
Olson-Kennedy convinced her parents to allow her to begin taking puberty blockers by telling them that the process was reversible, Breen told The Daily Signal. Shortly before she turned 14, Olson-Kennedy started her on testosterone.
“She proposed the idea of ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or living son’ to my parents, and I was not suicidal at the time,” Breen recalled. “So I think she was sort of presenting that and the really grave statistics that are actually somewhat inaccurate to my parents, to incentivize them to keep going with the treatment.”
But the drugs only made Breen’s mental health worse.
“I was never actively suicidal before testosterone, but I was actively suicidal post-testosterone,” she recalled, “and I was much more symptomatic of things like depression or things that they were saying to my parents that they were treating with the cross-sex hormones.”
At 14, Breen underwent a double mastectomy to remove her breasts. Her mental state immediately got worse, and her anxiety developed into what she describes as a “psychotic break.”
“What really, really upset me is that I will never be able to breastfeed, and I will have to get surgery every 10 years to replace the implants, and it won’t look as natural as it should have been,” she said. “I will never know what my body should have looked like.”
Earlier this year, Breen began to discuss the past sexual abuse in therapy and to accept her female body.
“It wasn’t until I had actually gone through therapy that I started thinking, ‘Why am I really doing this?’ And I started actually picturing my future and when I got to college and I was in an all-male dorm,” she said, “and I just started looking around me. And I didn’t feel like I was living as myself.”
“I was living as somebody I created to run away from myself,” Breen told The Daily Signal.
At first, the 20-year-old didn’t want to go public. But as she reflected on her experience with Olson-Kennedy and the specialist’s “egregious” standard of care, Breen said, she became sure she needed to speak out.
Detrans Law, also known as the Law Firm of Campbell Miller Payne, is the legal representative for Breen in coordination with LiMandri & Jonna LLP and the Center for American Liberty.
“It would feel great to know not just that I would be getting justice, but that in the future, children would be treated better,” she said. “Because I think every child is entitled to proper diagnoses, proper mental health care, and I really hope that this [lawsuit] can change something about the standard of care.”
The butchery of young girls in the name of transgenderism must stop, Mark Trammell, executive director and general counsel of the Center for American Liberty, told The Daily Signal.
“It’s alarming how many young girls have been victimized by the gender-industrial complex,” Trammell said. “It’s imperative that every American takes a bold stand in the face of cancel culture to defend these girls’ innocence and basic human rights. If they’re not old enough to consent to a tattoo, they’re certainly not old enough to consent to double mastectomies and cross-sex hormones that alter their future.”
Olson-Kennedy came under fire in October for admitting to hiding the results of a two-year, $10 million, taxpayer-funded study that showed puberty blockers don’t improve children’s mental health.
The physician directed the study, which involved putting 95 children who struggled with gender dysphoria on puberty blockers.
The data won’t be released because “the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court,” New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi writes, summarizing Olson-Kennedy’s reasoning.
Based on her own experiences, Breen said, transgender medical interventions for children should be illegal.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last Wednesday in a case that is expected to decide whether states may ban irreversible transgender medical interventions for children.
In United States v. Skrmetti, the high court will decide whether a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers, hormone replacement regimens, and transgender surgeries for children is constitutional.
“I think it is important to tell kids that there’s nothing wrong with them physically, they’re perfect the way they are. And if they feel ashamed of who they are and ashamed of their body, that’s not their fault,” Breen said. “It’s other people’s fault for making them feel that way, and learning to love yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself.”
Breen is hesitant to say transitioning is the wrong choice for everyone. But she doesn’t think kids can consent to procedures that are so “life-altering and impact fertility, impact function, impact your health, cholesterol, [and] bone density,” she said.
“A child can’t consent to becoming a lifelong patient,” Breen said.
When Clementine Breen started on puberty blockers, she was a 12-year-old child with no idea she wanted children of her own one day, she said. She shouldn’t have been allowed to make a decision that would potentially make her infertile, Breen added.
“I really hope in the future I can just move forward from this and live a happy life as a woman,” she said. “I really hope to be a mother one day. Hopefully, that’s possible. I have no idea. I hope I can just move forward from this and spend the rest of my life as who I was supposed to be.”
Looking back, Breen told The Daily Signal, she wishes that rather than prescribing puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy had told her that puberty is uncomfortable for everyone, especially girls who experienced sexual abuse.
“If she had just asked me if I had gone through sexual abuse, or if I had weird experiences in my childhood that may change my opinions about gender, I think I might have come to a different conclusion,” Breen said. “So I really wish she sort of interrogated my ideas about womanhood.”