(LifeSiteNews) – A long-awaited, taxpayer-funded study undermining the case for chemically transitioning gender–confused children has finally been released, after being delayed for failing to affirm the biases of its left-wing author.
As LifeSiteNews covered in October 2024, starting in 2015 Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Trans Youth Health & Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, “recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers,” then “followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health,” according to the New York Times. She told the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that she expected to find that the kids would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”
But the findings reportedly did not show the improvements she anticipated, which she attempted to downplay while refusing to release the data for other researchers to examine for themselves. Olson-Kennedy claimed she did not want her work to be “weaponized.”
READ: Trump HHS launches probe into hospitals for not complying with ban on child ‘gender transitions’
Now, the $10 million NIH study has finally been published, and while Olson-Kennedy and her coathors claim “it is likely that puberty blockers prevent the deterioration of mental health,” the actual findings are that the subjects’ depression symptoms “did not change significantly over 24 months” of receiving puberty blockers.
“One mental health marker that did appear to improve was suicidality, although it’s unclear whether the study authors considered this shift statistically significant,” writes health and science journalist Benjamin Ryan. “At the study’s baseline, 20 of the children reported ever experiencing suicidal ideation, 11 had done so during the prior six months, three had made a suicide plan in the past six months, and two had reported a suicide attempt during the previous six months, one of which led to an injury requiring medical care. At the 24-month mark, five participants reported suicidal ideation during the previous six months, none had made a recent suicide plan and one had attempted suicide recently, but this did not result in an injury requiring medical care.”
“A clear acknowledgment of their data would reveal that puberty blockers offer no mental health benefit,” responded Do No Harm medical director Dr. Kurt Miceli to the Washington Examiner. “Despite this, the release of these results had been delayed for years. The full study once again demonstrates a lack of high-quality evidence supporting the so-called ‘affirming’ model,” who added that Olson-Kennedy’s conclusion “resembles a hypothesis rather than a definitive finding.”
READ: FBI asks Americans to report medical facilities that ‘transition’ gender-confused kids
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
