A UCLA student is suing two California doctors, alleging they improperly “fast-tracked” her for an “irreversibly damaging” gender transformation that began when she was 12 years old.
Kaya Clementine Breen, now 20, filed her lawsuit on Thursday, accusing Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who runs the nation’s largest transgender youth clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and numerous other defendants of pressuring her into transitioning to a male while ignoring her mental health issues and history of sexual abuse.
“She needed psychotherapy,” the suit reads in part. Instead, Breen was “fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging” transgender medical procedures.
According to the lawsuit, Breen began taking puberty blockers at age 12, cross-sex hormones at age 13, and had a double mastectomy at age 14.
According to the lawsuit, Olson-Kennedy diagnosed Breen with gender dysmorphia “mere minutes” into their first appointment and recommended puberty blockers at the same time, accusing the doctor of concealing important information and outright lying to Breen and her parents about the risks and necessity of treatments.
According to a spokesman from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development has been providing high-quality, age-appropriate, and medically necessary care for over 30 years.
The spokesman added in an email that the center does not comment on pending lawsuits or specific patients and their care.
In order to prevent critics of transgender medical treatments from “weaponizing” the findings, Olson-Kennedy faced criticism this fall after admitting to The New York Times that her team had not yet published research demonstrating that puberty blockers did not improve mental health in young people.
Breen began visiting a therapist just before enrolling in college and realized she “may not actually be ‘trans’ but rather had been suffering from PTSD and other issues related to her unresolved trauma,” according to the lawsuit.
Since then, she has stopped using testosterone and claims her mental health has improved, but the lawsuit claims “her body has been irreversibly and profoundly damaged” to the point where she is “almost certainly infertile.”
The Golden State has increasingly positioned itself as a safe haven for transgender people, passing a shield law that prohibits police from cooperating with out-of-state prosecutions for people seeking transgender medical procedures and drugs in California, as well as a law that prohibits school districts from notifying parents if their child identifies as a gender other than that on their school records.
The day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether states can forbid gender transition care for juveniles, Breen filed his lawsuit, seeking unspecified damages.
Her lawsuit also names Dr. Scott Mosser and the Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco. According to the lawsuit, Olson-Kennedy recommended Breen receive top surgery from Mosser, and the procedure was planned “after a perfunctory virtual meeting” with someone in Mosser’s office.
Mosser met with Breen and her mother for less than 30 minutes on the day of surgery before “rubber-stamping” the procedure.
A Gender Confirmation Center representative declined to comment on “protected health information or pending litigation,” citing HIPAA, but told Fox News Digital in an email that there is “no such thing as a rubber-stamped patient interaction at the GCC.”
The center directed Fox News Digital to an additional statement from Mosser, which read, in part, “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.”
The statement continued, “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.”