Transgender activist and medical doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy intentionally delayed and continues to withhold the publication of a $9.7 million taxpayer-funded study showing that puberty blockers do not improve the mental health of children with gender dysphoria.
Olson-Kennedy spoke to the New York Times to explain why she continues to avoid publishing the taxpayer-funded study after almost ten years.
“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.”
Best-selling children’s author summarized Olson-Kennedy’s explanation for withholding the data fairly well in an X post viewed by more than 15 million readers.
“We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children,” Rowling wrote.
The study began in 2015 when Olson-Kennedy started treating 95 children suffering from gender dysphoria with irreversible puberty blockers and studying their mental state.
Puberty blockers, many of which were originally developed to treat prostate cancer or other unrelated conditions, cause permanent damage to childhood development, stunting bone growth, potentially harming fertility, and altering adolescent development in ways that cannot later be reversed.
Olson-Kennedy admitted that, over the course of the study, she found no evidence that puberty blockers improved the mental health of the children.
She told the newspaper that the lack of improvement was likely because the children were already doing well mentally when the study began.
However, her previous findings directly contradict that claim.
At the outset of the study, out of 95 children with a median age of 11.2, 28 percent displayed depressive symptoms, 22 percent were diagnosed with anxiety, and 23 percent had suicidal ideation, with 7.9 percent reporting suicide attempts.
Additionally, one of the major arguments advanced in favor of so-called “gender affirming” hormone treatments is that children will become depressed and suicidal without the sex-change drugs. The findings of the study appear to show no support whatsoever for this commonly made claim.
Olson-Kennedy claimed that if she releases her results now, showing no benefit from puberty blockers, the data would be “weaponized” and used in court to push for restrictions on the drugs.
She has a long history of radical support for gender transitions for children, with PBS reporting in 2016 that she personally had 500 transgender minor patients, one of whom was only three years old.
One of the other scientists on the project told the Times that, although she doesn’t want to see the study’s findings weaponized either, she believes that they should be made public.
“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” said Amy Tishelman speaking to the Times.
Olson-Kennedy claims that she intends to publish the full study at some unspecified point in the future but tried to blame the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for cutting her budget, causing the delay.
She also told the Times that her personal clinical experience, which she claims shows the benefits of puberty blockers, should be considered alongside studies showing otherwise.
Typically, science is based on data and studies as opposed to personal anecdotes, as Olson-Kennedy advocates.
The new findings, if they’re ever made public, would stand in contradiction to the landmark 2011 Dutch study, which has been used to justify prescribing puberty blockers to minors. That study purported to find improvement in the mental state of children receiving the drugs.
Those same scientists, however, found that in most cases, children experiencing gender dysphoria had that dysphoria resolved after undergoing normal puberty, according to the Times.
Most major European countries have more recently criticized the data supporting sex-change drugs for kids as being of poor quality.
A team of researchers in the U.K. conducted a similar study to Olson-Kennedy’s, trying to replicate the Dutch results.
Like Olson-Kennedy, however, those scientists found that the blockers did not improve mental health, and in the first year after taking blockers, some children even had increased suicidal ideation.
That study also confirmed the negative effects of puberty blockers on bone development.
That study began in 2011 and, like Olson-Kennedy’s, was not released immediately, leading the public to continue believing that puberty blockers benefited children with gender dysphoria.
The UK researchers eventually released their findings in 2020, nine years after the study began.
Since then, the UK has banned the use of puberty blockers in standard treatment for transgender youth, citing negative health effects.
Maine remains one of the most permissive states in the nation for transgender medicine for children.
A newly released database from Do No Harm shows that between 2019 and 2023, 98 minors in Maine received transgender drugs, such as puberty blockers, or surgeries.
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