A doctor who is a prominent transgender rights activist admitted that she did not publish a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the impact of puberty blockers on children. Reportedly, the study showed that there’s no evidence that puberty blockers improve patients’ mental health.
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy made the admission to The New York Times. She began the study in 2015 as part of a broader project on transgender youth in America. Ninety-five children were recruited for the study and were given puberty blockers. Then, the results came in (via NYT):
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.
But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.
Now, why did Olson-Kennedy withhold the findings? She said it was because she does not want her work weaponized by those who do not support transgender ideology.
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she told the Times. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
Olson-Kennedy also claimed that the team faced delays because the National Institutes of Health cut funding due to politics. The NIH denied this claim.
“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” Amy Tishelman, a clinical and research psychologist at Boston College who was one of the study’s original researchers, told the outlet.
“No change isn’t necessarily a negative finding — there could be a preventative aspect to it,” she added. “We just don’t know without more investigation.”
For years, the left has claimed that if children do not have access to harmful “gender-affirming care,” they will commit suicide. In some cases, this kind of emotional blackmail is used on parents who are on the fence about allowing their children to undergo this kind of treatment.
The average age of the children in Olson-Kennedy’s study were 11 years old. Before receiving puberty blockers, one quarter of them had symptoms of depression and significant anxiety. Eight percent reported that they’d previously attempted suicide.
Olson-Kennedy’s hypothesis was that puberty blockers would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”
This did not happen.
As Townhall covered, this month, Do No Harm, a healthcare watchdog, published a first-of-its-kind database exposing the major U.S. hospitals and their physicians that perform bodily mutilation procedures on minors and prescribe them chemically castrating drugs in the name of so-called "gender affirmation."
In addition, other countries that previously trailblazer this kind of care have reversed course in recent years.
For example, in March, the United Kingdom sent shockwaves around the world when its National Health Service announced that children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers, which Townhall covered.
In February, researchers at the Netherlands’ University of Groningen released a 15-year study, Development of Gender Non-Contentedness During Adolescence and Early Adulthood. This groundbreaking study tracked the "gender unhappiness" of 2,772 participants ages 11 through 26. The study found that most children who think they're "transgender" at a young age end up outgrowing it.
Last year, Dr. Rittakerttu Kaltiala, one of Finland's top experts on pediatric gender medicine, said in an interview that "four out of five" children who believe that their biological sex does not align with their gender identity will eventually grow out of their gender confusion in their teenage years. Kaltiala insinuated that young people are impressionable and that social contagion can lead to gender confusion.
"The young person tries out different identities and is prone to suggestion. In one situation he feels that he is one and in another another. It's normal in adolescence," she said, as Townhall covered. Kaltiala pushed back on the tactic where parents are emotionally blackmailed into letting their child "transition" by being told that their child will commit suicide otherwise.
"It is not justified to tell the parents of young people experiencing transgenderism that without corrective treatment the young person is at risk of suicide without corrective treatment and that the danger can be countered with gender reassignment treatment," she said, acknowledging a study that found that the psychological well-being of minors who underwent "gender intervention" treatments worsened as a result.