A UCLA student is bringing a medical malpractice lawsuit against several California hospitals and healthcare providers, claiming she was misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria and then hurried onto a path of irreversibly harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.
In a lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, claimed that she was sexually abused as a young child and that by the time she was eleven, she was struggling with the idea of becoming a woman and had started to think that life would be simpler if she were a boy. She told her then-school counselor about this, and the counselor informed her that she was transgender and called her parents to confirm this.
According to the lawsuit, Breen’s parents took her to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria—the distress that arises when one’s gender identity and birth sex are at odds—and started receiving transition-related care at the age of twelve. Breen also claimed to be experiencing anxiety, depression, and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
Breen’s lawsuit claims that a group of alleged medical professionals agreed to prescribe a series of life-altering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to a vulnerable girl who was experiencing multiple instances of sexual abuse and complex mental health issues. The girl was then given a double mastectomy at the age of 14.
According to court documents, Breen’s mental health gradually deteriorated after getting puberty-suppressing medicine at age 12, cross-sex hormone prescriptions from the ages of 13 to 19, and a double mastectomy at the age of 14.
“In hindsight, I wish that someone had recommended 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 stated in an interview with NBC News on Thursday.
After beginning dialectical behavior therapy, a talk therapy that aims to assist people who struggle with strong emotions, early this year, Breen said she started to doubt her decision to transition.
She added, “I kind of started questioning whether I was doing this for the right reasons and my own gender identity.”
Breen’s lawsuit names the following defendants: the Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco, UCSF Health Community Hospitals, children’s hospital Los Angeles, psychotherapist Susan P. Landon, plastic surgeon Dr. Scott Mosser, who specializes in gender-affirming surgery, and adolescent medicine specialist Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy.
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.
In accordance with recommendations from professional associations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Endocrine Society, treatment is patient- and family-centered. The spokesperson stated in an email that Dr. Olson-Kennedy is not available for comment and that “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.”
A representative at the Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, where Mosser works, responded to a request for comment by stating that their medical facility does not engage in “rubber stamp” patient interactions.
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 sstatement, 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.
State laws that restrict access to transition-related care, such as cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers, have been condemned by a number of prominent U.S. medical associations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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 wroteon 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, caremay 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 severallawsuitsfiled 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 detransitionedsued Planned Parenthoodand 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 when she was 18.
Research suggests that regretting treatment for gender dysphoria is extremely rare, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. Asurvey conducted in 2015by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 8% of respondents detransitioned at some point in their life, with 62% of that grouponly 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. TheSupreme Courtis 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 anarticle published in Octoberthat 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.
CORRECTION (Dec. 19, 2024, 11:45 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated at what age the plaintiff in a Planned Parenthood lawsuit was when she started gender-affirming care. She was 18, not a minor.
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