A UCLA student is suing several California health care providers and hospitals for medical malpractice, saying she was misdiagnosed with dysphoria and “ran the irreversibly damaging conveyor belt” of contraceptives, sex hormones and surgery, according to reports. his fault.
Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, said she was raped as a child, and when she was 11 years old, “she began to struggle with the idea of being 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 told this to her school counselor at the time, the counselor told her “that she wasn’t a man and called her parents to tell them the same thing.”
Like Clementine Breen.
Breen, who also suffered from anxiety, depression and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report, was taken by his parents to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he was diagnosed with the disease. gender dysphoria – the anxiety a person can experience when their gender identity and birth sex are in conflict – and began to receive changes related to the age of 12.
“This case is about a group of qualified health professionals who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with mental health issues and suffering from multiple incidents of sexual abuse should be scheduled for a series of life-altering puberty and sex hormones, ultimately, to receive a double mastectomy at the age of 14,” Breen charged. it says.
Breen began receiving adolescent medication at age 12, was prescribed sex hormones from age 13 to 13 and underwent two surgeries at age 14. According to court documents, Breen said her “mental health continued to decline” following the treatment.
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Breen said, “In retrospect, I wish someone would have suggested real, honest treatment first, instead of gender-specific treatment, because really the treatment I got to was focused on gender dysphoria, and it didn’t connect my gender dysphoria to anything.” . “
Breen said she began questioning her decision to change after starting dialectical behavior therapy, a type of talk therapy aimed at helping those struggling with intense emotions, earlier this year.
“I began to question my character and whether I was doing this for the right reasons,” he said.
Breen defendants include Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an adolescent medicine physician specializing in male care; Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Mosser, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender-affirming surgery; Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco; UCSF Health Community Hospitals; and psychologist Susan P. Landon.
When asked for comment, 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, and needed treatment for more than 30 years.”
“Treatment is focused on the patient and family, following guidelines from professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Endocrine Society. We do not discuss pending appeals; and out of respect for patient privacy and compliance with state and federal laws, we do not discuss specific patients and/or their treatment,” the spokesperson said in an email, adding that “Dr. Olson-Kennedy could not be reached for comment.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, where Mosser works, said there is “no such thing as a rubber stamp patient interaction” at their health center.
“As health care providers, and in compliance with the provisions of HIPAA, we cannot comment on protected health information or pending litigation,” the spokesperson added in their email, which included a link to a statement from Mosser.
Mosser’s statement, which appears to have been posted on the Gender Confirmation Center’s website last week, praised the center as “at the forefront of women’s surgery, with the well-being of our patients as our highest priority.”
“Our strict procedures and protocols are designed to ensure that patients who go through our services fully understand the implications of the gender-affirming procedures they may choose to undergo as part of their transition,” Mosser said. “We regularly hear from former patients sharing updates about the positive impact this surgery has had on their lives – messages that keep coming many years after their surgery.”
UCSF Health Community Hospitals, which was named in the lawsuit, told NBC News that Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, where Breen was a patient in 2019, was not found by UCSF until August of this year. There was no more to say.
Landon did not respond to a request for comment.
Breen said he does not believe the health care providers named in his lawsuit “did it on purpose with little faith,” but said they were in denial about his pre-existing mental health.
When asked what he hopes to achieve from the lawsuits, Breen said he wants “some form of justice or reform.” While he’s seeking “a refund for the cost to me and my family,” he said, he’s more interested in “helping dispel the rumor that no one is fast-tracked in women’s medical care.”
A long list of major US medical organizations – including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association – support transgender minors who have access to care related to the transition, such as puberty blockers and sex hormones, and have criticized the country. laws prohibit such care.
“There is a strong consensus among leading medical organizations around the world that evidence-based, affirmative health care for transgender children and adolescents is important and necessary. It can even save lives,” Dr. Moira Szilagyi wrote on the website of the American Academy of Pediatrics in August 2022, when she was the president of the organization. .” The decision about whether and when to start gender-affirmation therapy, which does not involve hormone therapy or surgery, is individual and involves careful consideration. and each patient and their family.”
Child care for young people can look different depending on the age of the child and the situation. For young children, care may include a new name or a statement against a physical change. At the beginning of puberty, children can start puberty blockers to prevent them from developing secondary sex characteristics such as breasts or facial hair. Hormone therapy could come next, which would allow the child to physically develop into the male or female that matches their identity. Surgery-enhancing health care is rarely performed on minors, and the procedure is illegal in many states, though California is not among them.
In the past few years, there have been several lawsuits filed in the US and UK by “transgenders,” or those who have changed gender and returned to their birth sex. A 21-year-old New York woman sued Planned Parenthood and several health care providers in April alleging medical malpractice and a lack of informed consent, alleging that the defendants rushed her to get her underage sex checkup.
Research shows that self-reported treatment for gender dysphoria is “very rare,” according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. A 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 8% of respondents had transitioned at some point in their lives, and 62% of that group had only transitioned temporarily.
Security related to minors has become a divisive political issue, with Republicans in 26 states passing measures to ban or restrict women’s care of minors in recent years, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case challenging Tennessee’s ban on such storage.
Politics related to the care of young women were also said to be behind the decision made by Olson-Kennedy, one of Breen’s co-defendants, to delay the publication of a study she had done on the effects of teenage condoms. Olson-Kennedy told The New York Times in an article published in October that she did not publish the results, which found that the drug did not improve the mental health of young people with gender dysphoria, because she was afraid that the findings could move political models. The attack resulted in the country being banned from protecting women.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com