Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of LA Children’s Hospital is one of the better known “gender specialists” in the United States. She has achieved notoriety amongst gender critics for her controversial advocacy of early cross-sex hormone treatment and “social transition” of young children.
Her latest efforts to push the envelope on child transition are on display in a post she made two days ago on the public WPATH Facebook page, wherein she lobbies for the next WPATH Standards of Care (SOC 8) to support lowering the age of consent for “bottom” surgery (officially recommended to be 18 or older in the WPATH SOC 7).
To date, Olson’s post has garnered 52 “likes,” with plenty of enthusiastic responses. Only one clinician has raised a shadow of doubt.
What does Dr. Olson-Kennedy want? Nothing more than for immature preadolescents to be allowed to undergo–with full insurance coverage–major genital surgeries so they can impersonate the opposite sex at an earlier age.
Because of the upside-down activist-driven reality we live in today, rather than helping gender dysphoric young people come to terms with their healthy young bodies, Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues socially transition children to believe they are the opposite sex. By “affirming” a child’s (by definition, childish) idea that they are born in the “wrong” body, pediatric transgenderists like Olson-Kennedy condition the child to reject and even abhor their “wrong” body, thereby making natural puberty an enemy to be “blocked” at its onset—in the example Olson-Kennedy cites in her post, as early as age 11. Everyone in the child’s life is “supportive” and “affirming” of the fiction that one’s sex can be changed, so it’s not surprising that 100% (the figure cited most often by these gender specialists) of socially transitioned, puberty-blocked children desperately want to move on to full medical transition (and into the waiting arms of surgeons and endocrinologists). Carving up, sterilizing, and drugging a child’s body is becoming more and more normalized.
It’s worth noting that the WPATH Facebook page is not only frequented by doctors and psychologists. Comment threads are often dominated by trans activists, whose views are typically received as expert opinion. One such activist is trans woman Kelley Winters, a PhD. in electrical engineering who has presented to WPATH and is deferred to as an authority on matters of pediatric transition. Winters is not the only one; typically these individuals have no training in medicine or child psychology, with their only claim to authority on pushing for mutilating surgeries and hormones for other people’s children being their own transgenderism and conviction that turning other people’s children into lifelong medical patients is the right thing to do.
So Olson-Kennedy and others have created a medical condition that can only be treated by massive infusions of cross-sex hormones and surgeries. The children are blocked early, and now we have a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course these “girls” are not going to want to stop feminizing hormones. Of course they feel their lives have been “put on hold,” and they are all going to want “functioning vaginas.” The gender specialists have quite successfully crafted a situation where these young people will long for a surgically-engineered body as young as possible. How could they not want that? And how difficult would it be to desist from these longings once the train has started down that road, with all their friends, their families, and a prostrate media cheering them on?
Just to establish (and for my regular readers, review) a few simple facts:
- “Bottom” surgery aside, puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones results in guaranteed lifelong sterility. This is a fact that is never disputed by any specialist, but which is downplayed and seldom mentioned by anyone. Sterilization of children in any other context would be considered a human rights abuse, not a social justice triumph.
- There is no research or clinical evidence that gender identity is innate. On the contrary: There is decades of research showing that gender identity is a matter of identification with gender stereotypes and parental modeling. It is impossible to find a story about a “trans child” that does not include anecdotes about these children preferring typical gender-stereotyped activities, clothing, and hairstyles of the opposite sex.
- Frontal lobe development—in particular, sound judgment, the capacity to understand and care about future consequences, and impulse control—is not complete until the mid-20s.
- Young brains are highly plastic. It is patently obvious that the very act of “socially transitioning” young children to believe they are “born in the wrong body” conditions them to continue on to full medical transition, with all the attendant risks and consequences.
Olson-Kennedy’s thread is ongoing, with many enthusiastic commenters and supporters. I encourage readers to see for themselves and then inform others about what the leading lights of pediatric transition are doing and saying. This is the future for gender nonconforming children and preteens, and the public deserves to know.
