Healthcare is all about vibes today

"Gender affirming care" doctor refused to publish a study that failed to show puberty blockers worked to alleviate gender dysphoria and emotional distress in young people.

My thoughts on the doctor who refused to publish a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on puberty blockers for young people, because the results did not support her activism. Also in The Washington Examiner today.

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An influential doctor and pro-transgender activist withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effectiveness of puberty blockers.

For the study, researchers chose 95 gender-distressed children at an average age of 11 years old and gave them puberty-blocking drugs starting in 2015. The drugs delay the onset of puberty-driven changes such as breast development for girls and deepening of the voice for boys. The delay of the development of these sex characteristics is intended to alleviate gender dysphoria by allowing the subjects to remain less visibly “sexed.”

The study showed no evidence that the blockers improved the mental health of the young people. 

Last week the New York Times reported that Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy admitted she didn’t publish the study because the results would be “weaponized.” She said: “I do not want our work to be weaponized. It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

As J.K. Rowling put it, by “weaponized,” Olson-Kennedy must mean, “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.”

Right. It’s hard not to believe that harming children isn’t the point. At the very least, it is clear that harm to children is an acceptable side effect of ideology in Olson-Kennedy’s and the rest of the gender activists’ way of thinking. 

Olson-Kennedy then went on to mislead about the absence of evidence for mental health improvement in the study’s subjects. She said there was no improvement because they were “in really good shape” when they started and finished the treatment. 

It’s a lie. Olson-Kennedy’s assessment contradicts the data recorded by the researchers, which stated that about 25% of the participants “were depressed or suicidal” before receiving treatment.

It should be noted that Olson-Kennedy is one of the country’s leading advocates for gender-affirming treatment for minors and provides expert testimony in challenges to state bans on puberty-blocking drugs and other procedures. She is an activist, unconcerned with evidence. And given that the study did not produce the positive outcomes both assumed and promised, the activist class bolstered by Olson-Kennedy’s pedigree is assuming a “vibes-based” medical approach going forward. 

Is it any wonder that trust in physicians and hospitals has dropped from 71.5% in 2020 to 40.1% in 2024? This evidence-free, vibing method of care drove vaccine mandates for a vaccine that provably didn’t stop infection or transmission.

This same vibe-y approach to medicine brought us 6-feet of distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, which “sort of just appeared,” according to Dr. Anthony Fauci in his congressional testimony earlier this year. In that same testimony, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases went on to say that the 6-foot rule (enforced with stickers in grocery stores and the force of law) was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.” 

This empiric, non-data-backed decision was used to keep public school students out of school for a year and a half, which has led to historic learning loss, devastating mental health impacts, and record absenteeism. 

Add to that, the made-up 6-foot rule led to old and sick people dying alone in the hospital, people losing their livelihoods, no religious services or Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, no weddings, no youth sports, and deaths of despair from drug overdoses and suicide. All because of vibes. 

So, after years of COVID restrictions based on nothing but false precision and made-up, science-y sounding rules, the same “follow the science” crowd is unwilling to publish inconvenient results that fly in the face of its gender activism centered on taglines such as “kids know who they are” and “trans women are women.” 

Kennedy-Olson is the same doctor who was caught on camera saying, “Here’s the other thing about chest surgery — if you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them!” 

The utter disdain for children and the actual function of the human body is astonishing. We are not Mr. Potato Heads made of plastic and glue, our parts interchangeable, ornamental embellishments like a wig for a Halloween costume. This view is profoundly inhumane and soulless. And it’s ironic from the crowd that seems to believe we all have a gendered soul. This line of thinking treats our bodies as material to be altered at will, rather than functional, sacred flesh with a purpose. 

We women feed our children with our breasts. We derive from them sexual pleasure. It is evil to advise our girls that they can just cut them off and then paste them back on at will. And of course, this guidance from the medical community leaves out the part about how these fake, non-feeling, non-milk-producing breasts will look pretty, if you can get past all of the scarring, but they will not work. 

And of course, when a distressed child grows up and gets past the discomfort of a pubescent shape-shifting body, she might think: I am a woman and that discomfort of puberty was a passing phase. (Who isn’t uncomfortable during puberty?) 

This young adult is now left sterilized from the puberty blockers and butchered from a double mastectomy. She will also be abandoned by the gender activists and doctors who refuse to acknowledge that they failed to do no harm. These de-transitioners are cast aside and can forget about insurance paying for the boob job that Olson-Kennedy claims that they can get to correct their mistake, easily made right with yet another surgery, in her view. 

When I was an elite gymnast in the 1980s and pedophiles were running rampant on the coaching staff at my gym, I spoke with a trusted adult about what to do, who to tell. The gist of the response: We wouldn’t want to ruin the man’s reputation. And it would be so bad for the sport.

This was in the 1980s, long before the #MeToo movement. This is what an actual adult, a medical professional, in fact, said to me. It sounds utterly gruesome now. This friend might as well have said, “We don’t want these allegations to be weaponized against the sport.” 

Well, that is exactly what we needed. We needed the stories of abuse of over 500 young women and girls to be weaponized against the sport and against USA team “doctor” Larry Nassar in order for change to happen and for children to be protected. 

England’s National Health Service now disallows puberty blockers for young people. Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have all halted medical interventions for gender-distressed youth. Norway and France have urged extreme caution in pursuing medicalization of gender dysphoria in young people. 

The truth will win here in the United States as well. But untold numbers of children will be harmed while we wait for evidence-backed science to replace vibes and activism.