Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a pediatrician affiliated with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, is embroiled in a scandal over a taxpayer-funded study she led, as The Federalist recently reported. Olson-Kennedy has long argued that turning gender-confused kids into lifelong medical patients — via puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries — is the best way to save them from despair and suicide.
But The New York Times has revealed that Olson-Kennedy’s own research shows this isn’t true. The 95 young patients whom she and her colleagues observed for two years (with $10 million in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)) showed no improvement in their mental health despite receiving “affirming” medical interventions. There goes the narrative.
So Olson-Kennedy did what any politically motivated, conflict-of-interest-riddled “expert” would do — she buried the research. Otherwise, she fretted, the evil forces that oppose the destruction of children’s bodies to cure a mental disorder might seize on the research to support their position in courts, legislatures, and the public mind. “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she told the Times.
One of those evil forces, J.K. Rowling, paraphrased the good doctor’s objection: “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.”
None of this should surprise anyone who has followed Olson-Kennedy’s career in the trans industry limelight.
In the last episode,
