Mark Pulliam, a retired attorney and Misrule of Law blogger, said a lawsuit filed in California against a doctor who specializes in “youth gender medicine” for medical negligence has the ability to “collapse” the entire “enterprise” of gender transitioning treatments for minors.
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy (pictured above), who runs the nation’s largest transgender youth clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and numerous others were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by 20-year old Kaya Clementine Breen, who said she was “fast tracked” into transitioning to a male.
The lawsuit said Breen, despite suffering from a “complex, multi-faceted array of mental health symptoms as a child and adolescent,” was instead diagnosed by Dr. Olson-Kennedy with gender dysmorphia.
As a result, Breen began taking puberty blockers at age 12, started cross-sex hormones at 13 and underwent a double mastectomy at 14.
On Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pulliam, who practiced law in California for several decades, said Breen’s lawsuit has the ability to “collapse” the entire nationwide industry of gender transitioning treatments – including puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and sex-change surgeries – for minors.
“This lawsuit could very well have the effect of making this entire enterprise collapse because it’s like a big balloon -all it takes is one prick of a pin,” Pulliam said.
Pulliam added that the lawsuit has the ability to open peoples’ eyes and see such treatments on minors as “horror stories.”
“This whole thing, I think, will turn out to be something history looks back on as a horror story and we’ll wonder, ‘How did we let this happen?’ Akin to putting Japanese Americans in internment camps, it’ll be regarded like these eugenic procedures where people were sterilized. It’ll be a stain on our history,” Pulliam said.
With regard to gender transitioning treatments on minors, Pulliam explained how the industry is a “cash cow” for doctors, noting how such treatments create “patients for life.”
“For the people doing it, it is a cash cow. They figure once you get these people signed up, not only do you get to do these very lucrative surgeries, but then you have a lifetime patient who’s going to need ongoing hormones, supplements, and so forth. It’s a profit motive,” Pulliam said.
Pulliam added that the profitability of the industry alongside statistics that show a majority of minors who undergo such treatments go on to regret it into adulthood is a strong reason why the defendants in the case will likely move to settle the case before it gets to trial.
“I think anybody who listened to these facts, and that’s what a defense lawyer is going to do, is say, how is a jury drawn from the ranks of the Los Angeles jury pool going to view this, and they’re going to view it as a horror story with a young, sympathetic woman whose life has been ruined. This is the classic case, and you have a deep-pocketed defendant, so this is a sky is the limit type of case, that they’re going to try to settle this,” Pulliam explained.
“The fact that this case is getting so much attention, not just in California, but nationally, is going to have a ripple effect throughout the entire industry…I would assume that this is going to be not just in the high six figures, but it’s going to be well into the seven figure settlement,” Pulliam added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Johanna Olson-Kennedy” by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
