On 12/13/2024 12:58 AM, useapen wrote:
> A UCLA student is suing multiple California health care providers and
> hospitals for medical negligence, alleging she was wrongly diagnosed with
> gender dysphoria and then “fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of
> irreversibly damaging” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery,
> according to her lawsuit.
>
> Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, said she experienced sexual abuse as a young
> child, and by the time she was 11, she “began struggling with the thought
> of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier
> if she were a boy,” according to her suit filed last week in Los Angeles
> County Superior Court. When she expressed this to her then-school
> counselor, the counselor told her “that she was transgender and called her
> parents to tell them the same.”
>
> Breen, who was also suffering from anxiety, depression and undiagnosed
> post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit, was then taken
> by her parents to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at
> Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she said she was diagnosed with
> gender dysphoria — the distress one can experience when their gender
> identity and birth sex are in conflict — and began to receive transition-
> related care at 12 years old.
>
> “This case is about a team of purported health care providers who
> collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental
> health struggles and suffering from multiple instances of sexual abuse
> should be prescribed a series of life-altering puberty blockers and cross-
> sex hormones, ultimately, receive a double mastectomy at the age of 14,”
> Breen’s lawsuit states.
>
> Breen began receiving puberty-suppressing medication at 12, was prescribed
> cross-sex hormones from 13 to 19 and underwent a double mastectomy at 14,
> according to court documents, which stated that her “her mental health
> progressively declined” following these treatments.
>
> In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Breen said, “In retrospect, I
> wish that somebody had suggested real, genuine therapy first, instead of
> gender-specific therapy, because really the only therapy that I received
> until much later was specifically focused on gender dysphoria, and didn’t
> connect my gender dysphoria to anything else.”
>
> Breen said she began to question her decision to transition after she
> started dialectical behavior therapy, a type of talk therapy that seeks to
> help those struggling with intense emotions, earlier this year.
>
> “I sort of started questioning my own gender identity and if I was doing
> this for the right reasons,” she said.
>
> The defendants in Breen’s lawsuit include Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an
> adolescent medicine physician specializing in gender-affirming care;
> Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Mosser, a plastic surgeon
> specializing in gender-affirming surgery; the Gender Confirmation Center
> of San Francisco; UCSF Health Community Hospitals; and psychotherapist
> Susan P. Landon.
>
> When asked to comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson said the Center for
> Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles,
> where Olson-Kennedy works, has “provided high quality, age-appropriate,
> medically necessary care for more than 30 years.”
>
> “Treatment is patient- and family-centered, following guidelines from
> professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics,
> American Medical Association, and Endocrine Society. We do not comment on
> pending litigation; and out of respect for patient privacy and in
> compliance with state and federal laws, we do not comment on specific
> patients and/or their treatment,” the spokesperson said in an email,
> adding that “Dr. Olson-Kennedy is unavailable for comment.”
>
> In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the Gender
> Confirmation Center in San Francisco, where Mosser works, said there’s “no
> such thing as a rubber stamp patient interaction” at their health
> facility.
>
> “As healthcare providers, and in compliance with HIPAA considerations, we
> are unable to comment on specific protected health information or pending
> litigation,” the spokesperson added in their email, which also included a
> link to a statement from Mosser.
>
> Mosser’s statement, which appears to have been posted to the Gender
> Confirmation Center’s website last week, applauded the center as being “at
> the forefront of gender-affirming surgery, with the wellbeing of our
> patients as our highest priority.”
>
> “Our robust processes and protocols are designed to ensure that patients
> navigating our services fully understand the implications of the gender-
> affirming procedures they may choose to undergo as part of their
> transition,” Mosser stated. “We regularly hear from former patients
> sharing updates about the overwhelmingly positive impact these surgeries
> have had on their lives — messages that continue to arrive many years
> after their procedures.”
>
> UCSF Health Community Hospitals, which is named in the lawsuit, told NBC
> News that Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, where Breen was a patient in
> 2019, was not acquired by UCSF until August of this year. It had no
> further comment.
>
> Landon did not respond to a request for comment.
>
> Breen said she doesn’t believe the individual health providers named in
> her lawsuit “intentionally acted in poor faith,” but she alleged they were
> dismissive of her pre-existing mental health issues.
>
> When asked what she hopes to get from this lawsuit, Breen said she wants
> “some semblance of justice or change.” While she is seeking “financial
> reimbursement for the amount that this has cost me and my family,” she
> said, she most of all wants to “help dismantle the rumor that no one is
> ever fast-tracked into gender treatments.”
>
> A long list of major U.S. medical associations — including the American
> Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American
> Psychiatric Association — support transgender minors having access to
> transition-related care, like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and
> have denounced state laws restricting such care.
>
> “There is strong consensus among the most prominent medical organizations
> worldwide that evidence-based, gender-affirming care for transgender
> children and adolescents is medically necessary and appropriate. It can
> even be lifesaving,” Dr. Moira Szilagyi wrote on the American Academy of
> Pediatrics website in August 2022, when she was the organization’s
> president. “The decision of whether and when to start gender-affirming
> treatment, which does not necessarily lead to hormone therapy or surgery,
> is personal and involves careful consideration by each patient and their
> family.”
>
> Gender-affirming care for minors can look different depending on the
> child’s age and circumstances. For young children, care may involve a new
> name or pronoun as opposed to physical changes. At the onset of puberty,
> children may begin puberty blockers to inhibit them from developing
> secondary sex characteristics like breasts or facial hair. Hormone therapy
> may come next, which would allow the teenager to physically develop into
> the gender matching their identity. Surgical gender-affirming care is
> rarely performed on minors, and these procedures are illegal in dozens of
> states, though California is not among them.
>
> Over the past few years, there have been several lawsuits filed in the
> U.S. and the U.K. by “detransitioners,” or those who transitioned genders
> and then transitioned back to their birth sex. A 21-year-old New York
> woman who had detransitioned sued Planned Parenthood and several
> individual health care providers in April claiming medical malpractice and
> a lack of informed consent, alleging the defendants rushed her into
> undergoing gender-affirming care as a minor.
>
> Research suggests that regretting treatment for gender dysphoria is
> “extremely rare,” according to the World Professional Association for
> Transgender Health, or WPATH. A survey conducted in 2015 by the National
> Center for Transgender Equality found that 8% of respondents
> detransitioned at some point in their life, with 62% of that group only
> detransitioning temporarily.
>
> Transition-related care for minors has been a divisive political issue,
> with Republicans in 26 states passing measures to ban or restrict gender-
> affirming care for minors in recent years, according to the Movement
> Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. The Supreme Court is currently
> weighing a case challenging Tennessee’s ban on such care.
>
> The politics surrounding gender-affirming care for minors were also
> reportedly behind a decision by Olson-Kennedy, one of the defendants in
> Breen’s lawsuit, to delay publication of a study she conducted on the
> effects of puberty blockers. Olson-Kennedy told The New York Times in an
> article published in October that she didn’t publish the results, which
> found the medication did not improve the mental health of minors with
> gender dysphoria, because she feared the findings might fuel the types of
> political attacks that led to state bans on gender-affirming care.
>
> https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/ucla-student-sues-california-
> doctors-says-was-fast-tracked-transgender-rcna183815

F. Packers wrote:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/ucla-student-sues-california-doctors-says-was-fast-tracked-transgender-rcna183815

Good. We need more of these lawsuits.

>Who could have seen this coming?

Breaking great news: UK bans puberty blockers for minors.

'The expert group said prescribing the drugs to children for gender
dysphoria was an "unacceptable safety risk".'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly2z0gx3p5o