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.”
Kaya Clementine Breen.
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.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
