Clementine endured an onslaught of mental health challenges as a child: depression, anxiety, panic attacks, autism, psychosis, and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder—all of which were likely caused by the sexual abuse she faced as a child.
When Clementine was meeting with her school counselor to discuss her declining mental health, she expressed that she was struggling with the reality of becoming a woman. In response, the counselor told Clementine and her parents that she was transgender. She was about to have her twelfth birthday.
Shocked to hear this, Clementine’s parents took her to the experts for direction. It took one visit for Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy—one of the nation’s leading voices in pediatric gender-affirming care—to diagnose Clementine with gender dysphoria and recommend puberty blockers. In that visit, Dr. Olson-Kennedy did not inquire about Clementine’s past trauma, abuse, or mental health struggles.
Under Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s “care,” Clementine had puberty blockers surgically implanted at 12, a prescription for testosterone at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14.
This is gender-affirming care.
The number of girls identifying as boys has skyrocketed by over 4,000% in the past decade. This phenomenon—children thinking they are the wrong sex—is unlike anything mankind has faced. Gender dysphoria has indeed been documented in medical literature for decades. But the condition primarily affected a small percentage of boys, not tens of thousands of girls.
Very few were openly curious about the abrupt rise of girls identifying as transgender. Why, all of a sudden, are Sarahs becoming Jakes? Fewer questioned the efficacy and ethics of the gender-affirming care model. Are irreversible drugs and procedures the best treatment?
Thankfully, Not everyone’s curiosity was curbed.
Abigail Shrier was the first to pinpoint the transgender trend among girls to be a social contagion activated by the dawn of social media. Adolescent girls in distress with their bodies—and like Clementine, often dealing with past sexual abuse and/or mental health conditions—discover the ostensible escape to their anguish on Reddit or YouTube.
Online, they find stories of other girls describing the same bodily discomfort, as well as the solution to their agony—that their biological sex is incongruent with their gender identity, and they must align their sex with their gender. They then turn to experts like Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who, scalpel in hand, permanently transfigures girls’ bodies to their state of mind. Once gender-dysphoric girls start presenting as boys, they finally feel like their true, authentic selves.
Except for the ones who don’t. Those whose anguish gets worse.
Progressive states like Sweden and Norway walked so the United States could run in the arena of gender-affirming care. But over the past few years, the pioneers of the model reversed course, with the United Kingdom being the latest country to shut down its gender clinics for minors and ban puberty blockers due to the inadequate evidence supporting gender-affirming care.
But unlike its European counterparts, America and institutions like the American Academy of Pediatrics move full steam ahead. The lack of medical and moral consensus in America has brought the battle to the states. In 2021, Arkansas passed the nation’s first law limiting gender-affirming care for minors, while states like California have passed laws expanding its access.
Twenty-six states have since followed Arkansas, passing laws banning or limiting gender-affirming care for children. Multiple lawsuits have been filed challenging these laws, alleging that such restrictions prevent children from obtaining life-saving care.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, in which Tennessee is defending its law limiting gender-affirming care for minors. During the lengthy oral argument, the justices were intent on considering the most recent scientific evidence from Europe.
Europe’s findings tell a different story than what the American Academy of Pediatrics is telling doctors, unknowing parents, and vulnerable children.
Finland’s Council for Choices in Health Care found that “gender reassignment of minors is an experimental practice” and that “the reliability of the existing studies” is “highly uncertain.” Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare found that “the risks” of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “currently outweigh the possible benefits.” The UK’s 2024 Cass Report found “remarkably weak evidence” for gender-transition interventions.
Another critical finding from the Cass Report was the exposing of the fallacy that gender-affirming care prevents suicide.“There is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide,” the report states.
Would you rather have a dead daughter or an alive son? is chanted religiously by the experts to exploit parental love and to suppress the God-instilled alarm system about the prospect of seeing their image-bearing daughter's body irreversibly disfigured.
Such reprehensible manipulation I've never heard.
In the United States, a critical study was set to be published in October 2024 but was withheld due to the author’s fears that the findings of the $10 million government-funded study would be “weaponized” by critics. The study failed to corroborate puberty blockers’ indispensability for confused children.
The author was Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy.
The stories of regret began as suddenly as the movement rose to prominence. Detransitioners like Sophia, who started testosterone at 17, got a double mastectomy at 19 and regretted it at 20. Christina, who at 18, spent $9,000 of her college savings to get a double mastectomy, only to regret the unalterable procedure after one week. There’s also Daisy and Chloe and Soren and Helena and hundreds of others.
Rather than providing genuine care through counseling and social support, experts told them their immutable characteristics were facilitating the misery. The way through this distress, the experts preached, is to despise their female bodies. Yes, hate your breasts. We’ll cut them off for you.
Medicalized misogyny. Completely barbaric.
Predictably, removing breasts and loading females with male hormones results in severe health consequences like vaginal atrophy and bleeding, suppressed immunity, cancer, and infertility. Their voices deepened, faces masculinized by the testosterone. Their chests, indelibly flattened.
For those who can conceive and sustain a pregnancy, they cannot breastfeed. Their milk supply comes in after delivery, only to build up and clog, causing excruciating mastitis. “My chest is numb, and I don’t feel my baby when I hold him there,” says detransitioner Prisha Mosley.
The long-term side effects of gender-affirming care are not known, given the model is, as Finnish health authorities express, an experiment. How will these girls fare in twenty, thirty, and forty years?
Central to each detransition story is the negligence and cowardice of the medical and mental health community. Trusted adults—the experts—led children astray in the most devastating, irreversible ways.
“I didn’t need to be lied to,” detransitioner Chloe Cole testified to members of Congress. “I needed compassion. I needed to be loved. I needed therapy to help with my issues—not to be affirmed in my delusion.”
And yet, in many states, counselors currently face fines and suspension of their license if their practice—and their patients’ beliefs—is predicated on the reality that sex and gender are inextricable. That is, it’s considered malpractice in states like Colorado and Washington to steer children away from the gender-affirming care model.
At the end of high school, Clementine began seeing a new therapist. During these sessions, she realized that she wasn’t a boy trapped inside of a girl’s body but rather suffering from childhood trauma. Clementine decided to detransition. “I’ve found so much peace in being my true self,” she says.
Now, she’s joining a slew of lawsuits against the healthcare professionals that led her down the path of irreversible damage. Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is named as a defendant. “This so-called ‘treatment’ of Clementine by her providers represents a despicable, failed medical experiment and a knowing, deliberate, and gross breach of the standard of care that was substantially certain to cause serious harm,” the complaint alleges.
“Her body has been profoundly damaged in ways that can never be repaired.”
Instead of helping children deal with trauma, so as to create a more resilient, capable teen and later adult, deluded "first do no harm" medical providers have handicapped them for life. Beyond sad! Light must shine on this darkness.