By Spencer Lombardo
Religious liberty attorneys secured a legal victory for therapists who treat children struggling with gender confusion.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty secured a permanent order on Thursday from U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering requiring Michigan to stop enforcing its 2023 law that barred counselors from engaging in talk therapy aimed at helping children struggling with gender dysphoria, according to a press release by the legal organization. This comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that similar treatments are protected by the First Amendment. (RELATED: Nuns Fight Back Against Blue States’ Attempts To Force Them To Cover Contraceptives)
Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
“Michigan’s crackdown on talk therapy pushed children with gender dysphoria toward harmful, irreversible drugs and surgeries; the harms of these procedures are so serious that 26 states and at least five European countries have banned or significantly restricted them,” Becket senior counsel Luke Goodrich — who served as the counselors’ lead attorney — told the DCNF. “Thankfully, the Constitution stopped Michigan’s attack on free speech, religious liberty, and children in need.”
Goodrich said he wasn’t surprised that Michigan backed down, stating that the First Amendment “clearly protects conversations between counselors and their clients, and Michigan had no constitutional basis for silencing them.”
“The court’s order protects every licensed Michigan professional who practices talk therapy, not just the counselors who brought this case. It’s a major victory for kids, counselors, and common sense,” Goodrich added.
Transgender “rights” advocates say “transgender” children should be given medical procedures known as “gender affirming care.” But those procedures can harm people’s health. 95% of young transgender people on testosterone develop pelvic floor dysfunction; most have bowel issues and sexual dysfunction. As the Telegraph reported, “Around 87 per cent…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…Almost half had an ‘orgasm disorder’, while a quarter suffered from pain during sexual intercourse.”
Transgender treatments can lead to a lifetime of pain, discomfort, and medications. As Britain’s National Health Service explains, hormones “need to be taken for the rest of your life, even if you have gender surgery.” An FDA official who supported giving minors puberty blockers conceded that they actually increase suicidality. Indeed, the “FDA knew ‘gender affirming’ puberty blockers increase ‘suicidality’ in 2017,” reported Just the News.
Even the transgender lawyer who challenged Tennessee’s restrictions on transgender treatments for kids admitted to the Supreme Court that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among transgender youth, even those not given gender-affirming treatment, and that “there is no evidence…that this [transgender-affirming] treatment reduces completed suicide.” The ACLU’s Chase Strangio admitted that to the Supreme Court.
Yet doctors who did sex changes often falsely told parents that they needed to give their kids a sex change to keep them from committing suicide, even though this isn’t true. One of America’s most prominent gender doctors, “Dr. Olson-Kennedy disclosed to how she speaks with parents of gender dysphoric patients: ‘We often ask parents, “Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’”
Even doctors ideologically committed to giving kids sex changes can’t come up with evidence that kids benefit from a sex change. “Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the leading proponent of such care in the US, had been given $10 million in federal research funds to replicate what has become known as the Dutch study, which is really the foundation of Gender Affirming Care. Dr. Olson-Kennedy gathered a group of 95 pediatric gender patients and gave them puberty blockers with the express purpose of proving that this would improve their lives in measurable ways.” But her study failed to show that, so she suppressed the results for as long as she could, then published the study containing them so obscurely that no one noticed it had been published for three weeks. Earlier, the FDA warned that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and permanent vision loss.
As the New York Times reported:
The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care…
In a progress report submitted to the N.I.H. 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.”
But her study didn’t show such improvements, which didn’t happen. As John Sexton notes, “Had this study gone the way Dr. Olson-Kennedy expected, you can be sure she and many others would have trumpeted that fact from the rooftops. Gender Critical Care would have been given a veneer of scientific evidence, one which would have been cited around the world and by every online ideologue promoting puberty blockers for kids as young as 11. But that’s not how it worked out because the actual results of the research showed no improvement in mental health from giving kids blockers. Having failed to replicate the the Dutch study, Dr. Olson-Kennedy sat on the results for years. When confronted last October she admitted that the delay was about preserving her credibility as an expert witness in legal challenges to states who had banned Gender Affirming Care.”
The New York Times quoted Olson-Kennedy saying, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” As The Times notes, “Dr. Olson-Kennedy is one of the country’s most vocal advocates of adolescent gender treatments and has served as an expert witness in many legal challenges to the state bans. She said she was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact them,’ referring to transgender adolescents.”
But she couldn’t suppress the results of the taxpayer-funded study forever. Finally, “a pre-print version of the study was finally published online,” noted Hot Air. “It was done so quietly that no one noticed for three weeks.”
As the Washington Examiner reported,
The study, authored by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and colleagues and posted online before journal publication, found that depression symptoms in adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria “did not change significantly over 24 months” of being on puberty blockers…Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director for the advocacy group Do No Harm, which advocates against youth gender transitions, [pointed out that] “their data…reveal that puberty blockers offer no mental health benefit. Despite this, the release of these results had been delayed for years,” Miceli said. “The full study once again demonstrates a lack of high-quality evidence supporting the so-called ‘affirming’ model.”
As John Sexton points out, it was “a rough couple of weeks for Dr. Olson-Kennedy. Not only did her long-suppressed research finally make it to print, thereby undermining her argument for Gender Affirming Care, but also LA Children’s Hospital announced they are shutting down her pediatric gender clinic. Meanwhile, she is still being sued by a former patient named Clementine Breen who came to regret her transition and blames Dr. Olson-Kennedy for rushing her into it.”
The Economist reported:
Ms Breen’s story starts early in the 2016-17 school year, when she turned 12. She felt depressed and sought help from a guidance counsellor. “I mentioned that I might be trans,” she recalled in the interview, “but I also mentioned that I might be a lesbian and that I might be bisexual, like I wasn’t really sure about my identity at all.”…
Ms Breen and her lawyers claim that despite the vagueness of her musings about her identity, her counsellor fixed on the possibility that she was transgender. “Based on those conversations and few statements, the counsellor called Clementine’s parents and told them she believed Clementine was transgender,” they write in the complaint…Her parents took her to the CHLA gender clinic, and Ms Breen’s first appointment there, records show, was in December 2016.
Dr Olson-Kennedy’s notes from that first visit show that she immediately set Ms Breen down a path towards medical transition. She writes that Ms Breen had not yet seen a gender therapist and had come out as trans three months earlier. Nevertheless, she asserts that Ms Breen meets the specific Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria for gender dysphoria, one of which, she writes, is a cross-sex identity that has lasted for six months or longer. A bit later Dr Olson-Kennedy asserts that Ms Breen also meets the criteria for the commencement of puberty blockers, including not “suffer[ing] from psychiatric comorbidity that interferes with the diagnostic work-up or treatment”. It is unclear how Dr Olson-Kennedy could have known that given that Ms Breen had not yet seen a psychologist about her gender dysphoria, and given that Dr Olson-Kennedy herself had performed no mental-health evaluation.
A year after being put on puberty blockers, Breen was given a double mastectomy at age 14. Olson-Kennedy allegedly told the surgeon she had been trans “since childhood,” although there was no basis for this claim.
In 2025, a federal judge in Alabama ruled that Alabama officials could publicly release records they obtained in discovery from WPATH, the medical association that pushes transgender treatments for kids by making inflated claims about the benefits of those treatments, and downplaying the risks of such treatments. A recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services finds that “WPATH suppressed” information that would call such treatments into question, notes Dr. Stanley Goldfarb.
As health and science reporter Benjamin Ryan notes, medical authorities in “UK, Sweden, Finland, and now Norway as well,” have recommended against “prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to trans-identifying minors.” Yet, in America, gender clinics are giving teenagers double mastectomies and other sex-change operations in many states. The Biden administration promoted puberty blockers, even though the FDA said puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and permanent vision loss.
