". . . and having done all . . . stand firm." Eph. 6:13

Newsletter

The News You Need

Subscribe to The Washington Stand

X
News

Doctor Withholds Taxpayer-Funded Research that Contradicts Her Beliefs on Puberty Blockers

October 24, 2024

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who serves as the medical director for the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has been conducting research on “transgender health” for nearly a decade as part of a larger federal project. Over the years, Olson-Kennedy has received $9.7 million in taxpayer money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But now that the results of her work are finally in, she is refusing to share them.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she claimed in an interview with The New York Times published Wednesday. She emphasized that the results of the research, which focused on 95 adolescents all around age 11, must be “exactly on point, clear and concise,” which she said “takes time.” However, as one of America’s leading voices supporting so-called “gender-affirming care” on minors, Olson-Kennedy admitted the results weren’t what she was expecting, because they did not prove that using puberty blockers improves an adolescent’s well-being.

The hypothesis was that after receiving hormone-blocking drugs, the trans-identifying children would see “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.” This theory, however, did not prove true, and Olson-Kennedy is concerned that publishing these results would only increase the growing opposition to experimenting with puberty blockers on minors.

Notably, critics aren’t buying the doctor’s reasoning. Since Olson-Kennedy has been collecting data since 2015, a professor of clinical psychology at Long Island University, Dr. Camilo Ortiz, contended that “a real scientist accepts what the data show and has an allegiance to the truth.” The California researcher holding back her findings “is not science,” he added. Rather, “This is activism, and the NIH should not be funding it.”

Amy Tishelman, one of the original researchers of the study, said, “I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there.” While Olson-Kennedy’s study was meant to reflect the Dutch Protocol research paper that came out of the Netherlands, which allegedly “found children whose gender dysphoria was treated with puberty blockers had better mental health outcomes,” experts have pointed out that those results have yet to be repeated. On the contrary, numerous findings and confessions have emerged that imply the opposite, that transgender procedures commonly fail to improve the well-being of gender-confused youth.

A recent example of this was the Cass Review, which found “no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce” suicidal thoughts and “remarkably weak evidence” to support using cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. This study also found no validation for the claim that a child who believes he or she is transgender will inevitably experience “longstanding gender dysphoria in the future.”

Olson-Kennedy’s decision to withhold the results of her research also comes in the wake of the 22 states that, as The Washington Times reported, “have banned gender-transition drugs and surgeries for minors,” with “another two states [that] have banned surgeries only, as the debate over ‘gender-affirming care’ reverberates through political and medical spheres.” According to the NIH, it is within Olson-Kennedy’s jurisdiction to decide when the results are published. The Times added, “While she said she intends to publish the results, she said her team has been delayed over NIH funding cuts to the project, which the NIH denied.”

“The suppression of the results of this study could reflect any number of problems,” Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon told The Washington Stand. “Perhaps the study itself is of poor quality and Olson-Kennedy has wasted taxpayer money in order to promote her own belief in gender ideology. Or perhaps the study actually proves that so called ‘gender-affirming care’ does not help children.”

Either way, Kilgannon emphasized that Olson-Kennedy’s behavior makes it seem she is “determined to prevent Americans from knowing the results of a study we paid for” through taxpayer money. More than that, she added, this is “a study that affects children in America and around the world.” Kilgannon concluded, “Maybe that is all we really need to know about it: her personal beliefs are more important than scientific findings or public scrutiny.”

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.



Amplify Our Voice for Truth