Last October the NY Times published an article that revealed how the science behind Gender Affirming Care for minors actually works. Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the leading proponent of such care in the US, had been given $10 million in federal research funds to replicate what has become known as the Dutch study, which is really the foundation of Gender Affirming Care. Dr. Olson-Kennedy gathered a group of 95 pediatric gender patients and gave them puberty blockers with the express purpose of proving that this would improve their lives in measurable ways.

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...

In a progress report submitted to the N.I.H. at that time, Dr. Olson-Kennedy outlined her hypothesis of how the children would fare after two years on puberty blockers: that they would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

Had this study gone the way Dr. Olson-Kennedy expected, you can be sure she and many others would have trumpeted that fact from the rooftops. Gender Critical Care would have been given a veneer of scientific evidence, one which would have been cited around the world and by every online ideologue promoting puberty blockers for kids as young as 11.

But that's not how it worked out because the actual results of the research showed no improvement in mental health from giving kids blockers. Having failed to replicate the the Dutch study, Dr. Olson-Kennedy sat on the results for years. When confronted last October she admitted that the delay was about preserving her credibility as an expert witness in legal challenges to states who had banned Gender Affirming Care.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”...

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is one of the country’s most vocal advocates of adolescent gender treatments and has served as an expert witness in many legal challenges to the state bans. She said she was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact them,” referring to transgender adolescents.

Last month, a pre-print version of the study was finally published online. It was done so quietly that no one noticed for three weeks.

🚨 The long-suppressed Olson-Kennedy puberty blocker study is finally out.

After 2 years on blockers, youth showed no significant improvement in depression, emotional health, or parent-reported behavior.

Once again, the Dutch study results failed to replicate. pic.twitter.com/WWC3yzhhFa

— Genspect (@genspect) June 5, 2025

The Washington Examiner wrote about it last week.

The study, authored by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and colleagues and posted online before journal publication, found that depression symptoms in adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria “did not change significantly over 24 months” of being on puberty blockers...

Olson-Kennedy and her co-authors argue in the paper that, although the patients’ mental health remained stable during the study period, “it is likely that puberty blockers prevent the deterioration of mental health.”

Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director for the advocacy group Do No Harm, which advocates against youth gender transitions, told the Washington Examiner that the research team’s conclusion “resembles a hypothesis rather than a definitive finding.”

“A clear acknowledgment of their data would reveal that puberty blockers offer no mental health benefit. Despite this, the release of these results had been delayed for years,” Miceli said. “The full study once again demonstrates a lack of high-quality evidence supporting the so-called ‘affirming’ model.”

It has been a rough couple of weeks for Dr. Olson-Kennedy. Not only did her long-suppressed research finally make it to print, thereby undermining her argument for Gender Affirming Care, but also LA Children's Hospital announced they are shutting down her pediatric gender clinic, as Ed wrote here. Meanwhile, she is still being sued by a former patient named Clementine Breen who came to regret her transition and blames Dr. Olson-Kennedy for rushing her into it.

Ms Breen’s story starts early in the 2016-17 school year, when she turned 12. She felt depressed and sought help from a guidance counsellor. “I mentioned that I might be trans,” she recalled in the interview, “but I also mentioned that I might be a lesbian and that I might be bisexual, like I wasn’t really sure about my identity at all.”...

Ms Breen and her lawyers claim that despite the vagueness of her musings about her identity, her counsellor fixed on the possibility that she was transgender. “Based on those conversations and few statements, the counsellor called Clementine’s parents and told them she believed Clementine was transgender,” they write in the complaint...Her parents took her to the CHLA gender clinic, and Ms Breen’s first appointment there, records show, was in December 2016.

Dr Olson-Kennedy’s notes from that first visit show that she immediately set Ms Breen down a path towards medical transition. She writes that Ms Breen had not yet seen a gender therapist and had come out as trans three months earlier. Nevertheless, she asserts that Ms Breen meets the specific Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria for gender dysphoria, one of which, she writes, is a cross-sex identity that has lasted for six months or longer. A bit later Dr Olson-Kennedy asserts that Ms Breen also meets the criteria for the commencement of puberty blockers, including not “suffer[ing] from psychiatric comorbidity that interferes with the diagnostic work-up or treatment”. It is unclear how Dr Olson-Kennedy could have known that given that Ms Breen had not yet seen a psychologist about her gender dysphoria, and given that Dr Olson-Kennedy herself had performed no mental-health evaluation.

A year after being put on blockers, Breen had a double mastectomy at age 14. Dr. Olson-Kennedy allegedly told the surgeon she had been trans "since childhood."

Slowly, the truth is coming out and that is changing the dynamics of this issue on the legal front. There are already 26 states that have passed bans on gender affirming care. The Supreme Court is currently considering a case involving a ban passed in Tennessee. We should have the outcome of that case in the next couple weeks.