Studies that reach politically inconvenient conclusions are sometimes buried. A researcher found that giving transgender kids puberty blockers doesn’t improve their mental health, but she hasn’t published the results, because they undermine the case for transitioning kids from one gender to another. She’s keeping the results hidden even though she received $9.7 million from the federal government to conduct her research.
(Refusing to publish unwelcome findings also occurs in studies of racial discrimination. When a study finds no racial discrimination is happening, rather than the discrimination a researchers hoped to prove, the study is often left sitting in the researcher’s file drawer, rather than being published. That can leave the misleading impression that racism is everywhere.)
The New York Times reports on how the head of America’s largest youth gender clinic concealed the results of an NIH-funded study showing that puberty blockers produced NO mental health benefits. The data from the $9.7 million taxpayer-funded study was hidden for years:
The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.
The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy expected to see benefits from giving puberty blockers to 11-year-olds, but that’s not what happened — puberty blockers did nothing for their mental well-being:
In a progress report submitted to the [National Institutes of Health] at that time, Dr. Olson-Kennedy outlined her hypothesis of how the children would fare after two years on puberty blockers: that they would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”
That hypothesis does not seem to have borne out.
“The data appears to show no real…improvement at all,” notes John Sexton. “If 25% were depressed or suicidal pre-treatment and the study results showed no improvement, that would suggest that 25% were still depressed or suicidal after getting puberty blockers. Clearly there was some room for improvement and puberty blockers didn’t deliver on the ‘decreased symptoms’ Dr. Olson-Kennedy predicted. Which is apparently why she has been sitting on these results. She admits she’s afraid the data could be used to undermine her own position.”
Olson-Kennedy 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 John Sexton observes, “Dr. Olson-Kennedy isn’t a disinterested scholar, she’s a vocal proponent of gender affirming care [such as puberty blockers] who is involved in fighting state bans in courts across the country…she went into this study in hopes of creating her own private silver bullet which she could use to fight for the efficacy of gender affirming care. But the results didn’t work out as she’d hoped so now she’s just sitting on the data, nine years and counting. The actual findings in this case appear to match with a similar UK gender clinic…That one was launched in 2011 and also found no improvement in outcomes as a result of puberty blockers, but the results of that study were not made public until 2020. Nine years, during which time puberty blockers became standard treatment in the UK despite a lack of research supporting their use. Both studies, the UK and the still unpublished US version, seem to jibe with the findings of the Cass Review which concluded there was little to no evidence supporting the use of puberty blockers.”
Jesse Singal points out that if researchers can just sit on results they don’t like, we can’t trust the results of federally-funded science:
A situation in which a researcher can ask for money from the federal government to run a study, run the study, and then not release the results because they weren’t what she wanted is a situation in which federal funding for science is fundamentally broken.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) October 23, 2024
The Biden administration has promoted puberty blockers, even though the FDA has warned that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and permanent vision loss. Puberty blockers also prevent the increase in bone density that would normally occur during puberty, with some patients experiencing lifelong bone issues, according to the New York Times.
The study finding no mental-health benefits from puberty blockers is relevant because when parents refuse to put their kids on puberty blockers, their children are sometimes taken from them by family court judges or child protective services. The Biden-Harris administration has issued foster-care regulations designed to pave the way for bureaucrats to take gender-confused kids away from “non-affirming” parents. The Daily Signal reports that 6,000 kids have had transgender surgeries, and a much higher number have received puberty blockers.
Transgender treatments have significant side effects. A recent study shows 95% of young biological women on testosterone developed pelvic floor dysfunction. The participants had bladder and bowel symptoms that medics would expect to see in a woman after the menopause.
As the London Telegraph reports, “Around 87 per cent of the participants had urinary symptoms such as incontinence, frequent toilet visits and bed-wetting, while 74 per cent had bowel issues including constipation or being unable to hold stools or wind in. Some 53 per cent suffered from sexual dysfunction.”
“The researchers said the rate of urinary incontinence, where urine unintentionally leaks, was around three times higher in transgender men than women, affecting around one in four compared to eight per cent of the general female population.”
“Almost half had an ‘orgasm disorder’, while a quarter suffered from pain during sexual intercourse.” The youngest of the study’s participants was age 18, while the average participant’s age was 28.
Sex changes massively increase suicide risks, rather than reducing them, according to a study. “Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks,” according to a recent study in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science. Hot Air sums up that peer-reviewed study as finding that “suicide risks” are “1200% higher after gender-affirming surgery.”
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort, as a transgender activist conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” That”s because of the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery. As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
“Gender affirming” surgery is risky. “An 18-year-old boy died when doctors tried to create a vagina for him using part of his colon. His colon was used because puberty blockers stopped growth of his genitals, which meant there wasn’t enough tissue to do the penile inversion surgery,” notes Chris Elston. A “trans teen died from vaginoplasty complications during landmark Dutch study used to justify child sex changes,” reports The Post-Millennial. “Major complications began within just 24 hours of the surgery.”
Sex-change doctors have concealed the negative effects of such surgeries, as the Daily Caller recently noted:
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) apparently blocked Johns Hopkins University researchers from publishing their findings regarding a study concerning child sex changes because they didn’t like what they discovered, newly unearthed emails reveal.
WPATH paid for Johns Hopkins researchers to study the possible effects of so-called “gender-affirming care” on children, according to the emails. “Gender–affirming care” is a euphemism proponents use to describe the use of irreversible hormone suppression and treatments that can lead to chemical castration, as well as surgeries like mastectomy, phalloplasty and vaginoplasty….The study allegedly found “little to no evidence” regarding support for children and adolescents who undergo these harmful procedures, the emails appear to show. Instead of ending their push to give minors irreversible sex-change surgeries and hormone treatments, WPATH appeared to block the study from being publicly released and published their recent guidelines encouraging doctors to continue operating on confused children.
Society pays the bill for sex change surgeries, which sometimes cost over $200,000, because the Affordable Care Act often requires insurers to cover sex changes and gender-reassignment surgery. So surgeries for people like Chu increase the health insurance premiums all insured Americans pay.
Sex-change surgeries are frequently a bad investment, because they often have life-threatening complications. “The truth about transgender surgery” is that “Just 16% of gender dysphoria patients go through with the operation, but up to half suffer life-threatening complications,” reports the London Daily Mail. “Up to half of trans men and women suffer post-op issues or pain so severe they need medical attention or additional surgery months later….Patients are often left with infections, pain and difficulty using the toilet or having sex post-surgery….the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario, Canada, earlier this year found that more than half of trans women who had ‘bottom’ surgery were in so much pain years later they needed medical attention.”
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