UCLA student sues California doctor who says she ‘fast-tracked’ sex change surgery

A UCLA student is reportedly suing multiple California health care providers and hospitals, alleging she was wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria and then “fast-tracked onto puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.” A conveyor belt of irreversible damage.” her lawsuit.

Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, said she experienced sexual abuse as a child and that by the age of 11, she “started to struggle with the idea of ​​growing up as a woman and started to believe that if “She was a boy and life would be easier,” according to the lawsuit she filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. When she expressed this to her then-school counselor, the counselor told her “she was transgender and slapped her.” Called her parents and told them the same thing. “

Breen also suffered from anxiety, depression and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder before her parents took her to the Center for Transgender Adolescent Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she said she was diagnosed with gender-neutral disorder, the lawsuit said. Anxiety disorders – the distress a person may experience when their gender identity conflicts with their birth sex – and receiving transition-related care starting at age 12.

“This case involves a group of so-called healthcare providers who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl who was struggling with complex mental health and had suffered repeated sexual abuse should be prescribed a life-changing series of puberty blockers and trans sex hormones, and eventually, at age 14, underwent a double mastectomy,” Breen’s lawsuit states.

Court documents state that Breen began taking puberty-suppressing drugs at age 12, took cross-sex hormones from age 13 to 19, and underwent a double mastectomy at age 14. After these treatments, the documents said, she suffered “mental health problems.” Gradually worsening.”

“Looking back, I wish someone had suggested real therapy instead of gender-specific therapy in the first place, because until much later, the only therapy I received was specifically for gender dysphoria,” Brin told NBC News on Thursday. And not connecting my gender dysphoria to anything else.

Breen said she began questioning her decision to transition earlier this year and came to Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a type of talk therapy designed to help people struggling with strong emotions.

“I started questioning my gender identity and whether I was doing this for the right reasons,” she said.

Defendants in Breen’s lawsuit include Dr. Johanna Olson Kennedy, an adolescent medicine physician specializing in gender-affirming care; Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Mosser, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender-affirming surgery; San Francisco Gender Affirmation Center; UCSF Health Community Hospital; and psychotherapist Susan P. Langdon.

Asked to comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson said the Center for Transgender Adolescent 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 and follows the guidelines of professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Endocrine Society. We do not comment on pending litigation; out of respect for patient privacy and in compliance with state and federal law, we “Does not comment on specific patients and/or their treatment,” a 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 Moser works, said there are “no rubber-stamp patient interactions” at their facility.

“As a health care provider, due to HIPAA considerations, we cannot comment on specific protected health information or pending litigation,” the spokesperson added in the email, which also contains a link to Mosser’s statement.

Moser’s statement, which appears to have been posted on the Gender Confirmation Center’s website last week, praised the center for being “at the forefront of gender confirmation surgery with the well-being of its patients as its top priority.”

“Our robust processes and protocols are designed to ensure that patients who use our services fully understand the impact of gender confirmation procedures they may choose to undergo during their transition process,” Moser said. “We often hear from former patients sharing how these procedures have affected them The latest news about the extremely positive impact on my life – messages that continue to come in years after the surgery.”

UCSF Health Community Hospital, named in the lawsuit, told NBC News that St. Francis Memorial Hospital, where Breen was treated in 2019, was not acquired by UCSF until August of this year. It had no further comment.

Langdon did not respond to a request for comment.

Breen said she doesn’t believe the individual medical providers named in the lawsuit “acted with willful malice,” but she claims they were dismissive of her pre-existing mental health issues.

Asked what she hopes to gain from the lawsuit, Breen said she wants “some level of justice or change.” She said that while she was seeking “financial compensation for what it cost me and my family,” she most wanted to “help dispel the myth that no one can access gender therapy quickly.”

A long list of major U.S. medical associations — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association — supports transgender minors’ access to transition-related care, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and condemns the state Laws restricting such care.

“There is a strong consensus among the world’s most prominent medical organizations that evidence-based, gender-affirming care for transgender children and adolescents is medically necessary and appropriate. It may even save lives,” Moira Sira Dr. Moira Szilagyi wrote on the American Academy of Pediatrics website in August 2022, when she served as president of the organization. “The decision of whether and when to initiate gender-affirming treatment (which does not necessarily require hormone therapy or surgery) is personal and requires careful consideration by each patient and their family.”

Gender-affirming care for minors may vary depending on the child’s age and circumstances. For younger children, care may involve new names or pronouns rather than physical changes. At the onset of puberty, children may be started on puberty blockers to prevent them from developing secondary sex characteristics, such as breast or facial hair. Hormone therapy may follow, which will allow the teen’s body to develop into the gender consistent with their identity. Gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed on minors, and they are illegal in dozens of states, although California is not among them.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of lawsuits filed in the United States and the United Kingdom by “transsexuals”—people who transition and then return to their birth gender. A 21-year-old New York woman who transitioned as transgender in April is suing Planned Parenthood and several individual health care providers, claiming medical malpractice and a lack of informed consent, and accusing the defendants of pushing her to receive gender-affirming care when she was a minor.

According to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), research shows that regrets about treatment for gender dysphoria are “extremely rare.” A 2015 survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 8% of respondents had experienced transition at some point in their lives, with 62% transitioning only temporarily.

The care of transgender-related minors has been a divisive political issue, with Republicans in 26 states passing measures in recent years to ban or limit gender-affirming care for minors, said the LGBTQ think tank Movement Progressive Project. The Supreme Court is currently considering a case challenging Tennessee’s ban on such care.

The politics surrounding gender-affirming care for minors were also reportedly behind the decision by Olson-Kennedy, one of the defendants in the Breen lawsuit, to delay the publication of her study on the effects of puberty blockers. Olson-Kennedy told The New York Times in an article published in October that she did not publish the results of a study that found the drug did not improve the mental health of minors with gender dysphoria because she was concerned These findings may fuel political change.

This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com