A controversial doctor and trans rights activist allegedly pushed a pre-teen into transitioning and lied that she was suicidal to treat her with testosterone — potentially rendering her infertile, according to a lawsuit.
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.
“People are just brushing exactly what happened to me off as something that doesn’t happen,” she said.
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.
And at one point when Breen’s parents told Olson-Kennedy they were concerned about putting their child on testosterone treatment, the doctor said Breen was suicidal, despite the fact that the pre-teen hadn’t had suicidal thoughts or ever expressed having them.
Still, Olson-Kennedy allegedly told them “if they did not agree to cross-sex hormone therapy, Clementine would commit suicide,” the court papers allege.
The doctor’s notes didn’t say anything about these supposed suicidal thoughts before the breast surgery and, in fact, her notes for the testoterone treatment described Breen’s mental state as “Alert … no acute distress… cooperative, smiling,” the outlet reported.
And the doctor allegedly falsely claimed, in a letter to a surgeon promoting the mastectomy, that Breen had “endorsed a male gender identity since childhood.” But this claim was belied by Olson-Kennedy’s own notes showing that Breen only started having identity questions just months prior, the report says.
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.
In Breen’s case, she said she first 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 and Olson-Kennedy didn’t even perform a mental-health evaluation herself, despite claiming at the time that Been met “the criteria for the commencement of puberty blockers,” the outlet reported.
But that didn’t stop the doctor from immediately putting Breen on the road to gender transition, the suit claims.
Three months after the first appointment, Breen had a puberty-blocker implant placed in her arm, less than a year later she was started on testosterone treatment and by May 2019, she had undergone the double mastectomy.
And Breen told the outlet that the treatments, while briefly making her feel better initially, ultimately caused her mental health to take a turn for the worse.
During this time, Breen’s medical records show that no one questioned her about whether the transition had helped or harmed her despite indications that things were going downhill for Breen — such as one doctor noting in September 2020 that she started “compulsive cutting to see if he has blood.”
The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles didn’t immediately return a request from The Post seeking comment Friday afternoon.
The hospital told the Economist it doesn’t comment on pending litigation or patients and their treatment.
A lawyer for Breen’s former therapist told the outlet that the notes from treating her were lost due to water damage and a lawyer who performed the surgery declined to comment to the outlet.
