Health
Doctor withholds results of study that fails to show transitioning improves kids’ health
From LifeSiteNews
A prominent doctor has been refusing to release the findings of a federally funded “transgender youth” study she began in 2015 because the results did not match the conclusions she hoped for, according to an explosive report in The New York Times.
The Times reported that Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Trans Youth Health & Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, “recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers,” then “followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health.” She told the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that she expected to find that the kids would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”
However, the study did not show the children doing better than they started. “Before receiving the drugs, around one-quarter of the group reported depression symptoms and significant anxiety, and one quarter reported ever having thoughts of suicide,” the Times says. “Eight percent reported a past suicide attempt.”
In an interview with the Times, Olson-Kennedy attempted to argue that the children’s starting point actually wasn’t so bad after all, and therefore the lack of change was not concerning: “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years.” On follow-up, she claimed her “good shape” comment was referring to data averages, and her conclusion about the full data was still pending.
Regardless, in the nine years since the study commenced, Olson-Kennedy has still yet to publish any of the data for outside observers to analyze for themselves, which she justified by claiming, “I do not want our work to be weaponized. It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
NEW: Azeen Ghorayshi reports in the @nytimes that prominent gender clinician Johanna Olson-Kennedy of @ChildrensLA has refused to publish data from a study on puberty blockers, fearing that the unimpressive results will be "weaponized" by critics of "gender-affirming care." 🧵 pic.twitter.com/DREXSNsFYk
— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) October 23, 2024
https://t.co/st0O6ox763 https://t.co/WZbnXv6DO2
— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) October 23, 2024
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin considering arguments about the permissibility of state laws prohibiting the gender “transitioning”” of minors.
From the Fraser Institute
Canadians continue to endure long wait times for health care. And while waiting for care can obviously be detrimental to your health and wellbeing, it can also hurt your pocketbook.
In 2024, the latest year of available data, the median wait—from referral by a family doctor to treatment by a specialist—was 30 weeks (including 15 weeks waiting for treatment after seeing a specialist). And last year, an estimated 1.5 million Canadians were waiting for care.
It’s no wonder Canadians are frustrated with the current state of health care.
Again, long waits for care adversely impact patients in many different ways including physical pain, psychological distress and worsened treatment outcomes as lengthy waits can make the treatment of some problems more difficult. There’s also a less-talked about consequence—the impact of health-care waits on the ability of patients to participate in day-to-day life, work and earn a living.
According to a recent study published by the Fraser Institute, wait times for non-emergency surgery cost Canadian patients $5.2 billion in lost wages in 2024. That’s about $3,300 for each of the 1.5 million patients waiting for care. Crucially, this estimate only considers time at work. After also accounting for free time outside of work, the cost increases to $15.9 billion or more than $10,200 per person.
Of course, some advocates of the health-care status quo argue that long waits for care remain a necessary trade-off to ensure all Canadians receive universal health-care coverage. But the experience of many high-income countries with universal health care shows the opposite.
Despite Canada ranking among the highest spenders (4th of 31 countries) on health care (as a percentage of its economy) among other developed countries with universal health care, we consistently rank among the bottom for the number of doctors, hospital beds, MRIs and CT scanners. Canada also has one of the worst records on access to timely health care.
So what do these other countries do differently than Canada? In short, they embrace the private sector as a partner in providing universal care.
Australia, for instance, spends less on health care (again, as a percentage of its economy) than Canada, yet the percentage of patients in Australia (33.1 per cent) who report waiting more than two months for non-emergency surgery was much higher in Canada (58.3 per cent). Unlike in Canada, Australian patients can choose to receive non-emergency surgery in either a private or public hospital. In 2021/22, 58.6 per cent of non-emergency surgeries in Australia were performed in private hospitals.
But we don’t need to look abroad for evidence that the private sector can help reduce wait times by delivering publicly-funded care. From 2010 to 2014, the Saskatchewan government, among other policies, contracted out publicly-funded surgeries to private clinics and lowered the province’s median wait time from one of the longest in the country (26.5 weeks in 2010) to one of the shortest (14.2 weeks in 2014). The initiative also reduced the average cost of procedures by 26 per cent.
Canadians are waiting longer than ever for health care, and the economic costs of these waits have never been higher. Until policymakers have the courage to enact genuine reform, based in part on more successful universal health-care systems, this status quo will continue to cost Canadian patients.
Mackenzie Moir
Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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