The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 531. What Can’t Be Undone | Detransitioner Clementine Breen

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Clementine Breen, a child who was moved through the transgender pipeline and has since de-transitioned. Together they walk through her story (from early sexual abuse to the daunting decision to undergo affirming surgery), the confusion and fallout thereafter, reorientation, and her lawsuit against the doctor who led her astray. Clementine Breen is a de-transitioner who experienced early sexual abuse before having her gender dysphoria misdiagnosed as being transgender. Top surgery was sold to her at age 13, all the while her parents were told the atrocious “dead daughter or living son” lie. She is currently embroiled in a landmark lawsuit against her former doctor, Dr. Olson Kennedy. This episode was filmed on January 1st, 2025.  | Links | For Clementine Breen:On X https://x.com/clementine_fb

Did you tell them about the abuse? I did not. Well, how much investigation into your history took place? Very little, because the second we got into my history, it just came crumbling down. In my referral, it says that I had held a male identity since childhood. Besides just physical discomfort with my body and just feeling disconnected from girls,

there was really no sign of prior gender dysphoria. Discomfort with your body and feeling disconnected with girls, that's called puberty. Right. I was already cleared for surgery, so I traveled to San Francisco, recommendation of Olsen, the specific doctor. By the time I was there... Why the specific doctor? Because he doesn't have age limits.

No age limits. Yeah. What's interesting about my case too is even in my referral notes, which the surgeon saw, there's conflicting information. So immediately you can tell it's sort of rubber stamped and they didn't really look through it. So now you wake up after surgery. What's that like? Hello everybody. My guest today is a young woman who has quite a terrible story to tell, but before you can

understand why I have her as a guest and why she's doing what she's doing. There's some individuals that I need to familiarize you with in some detail to set the context properly. And I'm gonna read that. First and foremost among those is Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy. Dr. Olson Kennedy serves as the medical director of the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development at Children's Hospital, Los Angeles. That's currently the largest transgender youth clinic in the U.S.

Dr. Olson Kennedy has authored or co-authored numerous studies on transgender youth concerning such topics as chest reconstruction and its effects, the development of so-called gender identity, the physiology of response to gender-affirming hormones and the consequence of pharmacologically induced puberty blockade. In 2015, she led a $10 million NIH-funded research project to study the effects of so-called gender-affirming medical practice aimed at youth. This study was a major enterprise and very financially significant by the standards of clinical investigation, one deemed publicly the largest such project in America.

What were the study's results? As far as we can determine, no evidence emerged whatsoever of improvements in mental health in consequence of pharmacological blockade of puberty, which is by the way the purpose of such blockade. Why or why not? Well, Olson Kennedy hypothesized after the fact, which is not a scientifically appropriate thing to do,

fundamentally, that this was because most of the children were already doing well when the study began. Why the need then for puberty blockers, given their clear danger and the dangers of the surgical road ahead they so often establish? In any case, the notoriously progressive New York Times reported that Olsen Kennedy elected not to publish her study results so that political opponents of gender-affirming care could not use the results as an argument against the use of puberty blockers. It shouldn't be necessary, except in this insane time, to point out that the artificial suppression of undesirable findings warps the entire scientific and medical enterprise, and that's the point,

as well as being utterly unconscionable given the degree of public funding for the inquiry and the motivated psychological and social consequences of abandoning it. Olson Kennedy is not the only person named in the lawsuit mounted by today's guest, nor his or place of work, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, the only institution identified and affected. Dr. Scott Mosser, a surgeon in San Francisco, has served or exploited, depending on your viewpoint, transgender, non-binary, and gender-expansive patients for more than 13 years. He's board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgeons, co-founder of the American Society of Gender Surgeons and founder of the Gender Institute

at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. That workplace formalized its Gender Institute in 2016, has received numerous grants to fund gender affirmingirming health care services, and is also a target of the suit. Now that we have these players and places named and established, let us turn to my guest. I was privileged today to speak with Ms. Clementine Breen, currently a 20-year-old UCLA theater student and detransitioner.

I discovered Clementine's story through one Chris Elston, a fellow Canadian known best by his online handle, Billboard Chris. Clementine encountered Chris on one of his sidewalk appearances at universities across the US and Canada, specifically this time at UCLA. She told him her story, which went viral, not least as a consequence of her age when the events recounted occurred. It was in consequence of this encounter and some later research that I invited her to my studio as a guest. Puberty blockers at 12.

Hormonal transformation, that's testosterone, at 13. And a double mastectomy, camouflaged terminologically as top surgery, that evil phrase, at 14. It's a terrible story, with at the moment a thankfully happy ending. pop surgery, that evil phrase at 14. It's a terrible story with at the moment, a thankfully happy ending. On with the show. So thank you for coming to Scottsdale today Clementine. I know that this is likely to be a difficult conversation.

And so we'll try to not make it any more painful than absolutely necessary. I think we'll try to not make it any more painful than absolutely necessary. I think we should probably start just by you telling people who you are and why you're here, what you're up to and why you're here. Okay? My name is Clementine. I'm a 20 year old college student. I don't really consider myself a super political person. I just, seeing news about topics like this and other detransitioners come out and tell their stories, I just felt like I had to say something

considering the details of my particular story. I felt like I couldn't just watch this unfold and not participate in the conversation. So I really just want to spread awareness about the reality of child transition and what actually happens to people after they decide to de-transition. Okay, now you're involved in a

notorious, I would say a notorious lawsuit. Not that notorious means unnecessary or bad, but it means well publicized and likely impactful one way or another. And as far I'm going to name people who are involved, and you tell me if that's correct, right? So, one of the physicians involved was Dr. Johanna? Johanna? Johanna. Johanna.

Dr. Johanna Olson Kennedy. And she's at the Center for Trans Youth and Human Development at the Children's Hospital in LA. Yes. Correct? Correct. at the Children's Hospital in LA, correct? Yes. Okay, and she's also President-elect of US PATH, which is a advocacy group, I suppose, or a hypothetically scientific consultation group focused on transgender issues. Another defendant is Dr. Scott Mosser at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. Yes.

And does that cover the territory? Also my therapist, Susan Landon as well. Susan Landon. And she was a psychotherapist? Yes. I was referred to her by Dr. Olson. Okay, you were referred by Dr. Olson. And what's Susan Landon's professional designation? I believe she's just a family and general therapist, but she works specifically with trans youth. Okay, okay.

So, well, let's go through these people one at a time. I'm very interested in the, I'm really interested with you, I think, in focusing on the personal and clinical elements of your case. And we can get to the legal and social and political implications later. You said already that you are not, your focus, you don't regard yourself as involved politically particularly.

Okay, that's fine. And I don't really think that this is fundamentally a political issue. I don't think so at all. You don't think so at all. Okay, so let's start at the beginning. So what procedures did you undergo and how old were you? Let's start with that.

When I was 12 years old, I had a puberty blocker implant placed in my left arm. And when I was 13 years old, I was put on testosterone, which I continued until about earlier this year. But the last couple years of being on testosterone, I was kind of on and off. And then when I was about 14 years old, I had a double mastectomy. Alright, so let's go back before you were 12. Obviously there's a reason that you were put on puberty blockers at 12. How did you come to be put on them?

So I guess that means how did you come in contact with Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy? How did you come in contact with this therapist, Susan Landon? And why? So you can go back as early as you want detailing out your childhood and early adolescence. Tell us what brought you to the physicians and the counselor or the psychologist counselor first. Yeah, so just to give like enough context, when I was about six years old, I was sexually abused. And that was something I had never even dealt with or talked about until much, much later on. So by the time that I was approaching puberty around 11 years old, I think I started going

through puberty. I started just feeling terrible, terrible anxiety about my body and about the idea of becoming a woman. And I felt really, really isolated from my female peers because I had really a different perspective on puberty and what it meant to be a woman because of what happened to me when I was really young. Can you detail to the degree that you're willing to or capable of what happened to you when you were six? Yeah. So I was sexually abused by an older classmate. He was about four years older than me and it went on for about a year.

So it was pretty intense. And I just, in my brain, I just sort of processed it as something I didn't need to think about. So I never really dealt with that until later. Okay. Can you… That's a typical response for a child, but it isn't exactly so much as that you might say that you don't need to think about it. It's really that you can't.

Exactly. Right? I mean, part of what happens to kids if they're hurt, and this is worse the younger they are, let's say, is that they don't have any framework of reference or any philosophical tools to understand what happened and certainly not why. They don't understand the motivation of the perpetrator. They don't understand their own vulnerability. They don't understand the failures of the systemsrator, they don't understand their own vulnerability, they don't understand the failures of the systems that were designed to protect them,

they don't have anybody to talk to. And so there's actually no way of processing that. It's not only a matter of like whatever avoidance there might have been on your part, it's that it's just, it's not really possible. What details of the abuse are you willing to share? Now, there's a reason I'm asking you that is because I want to know as much as you can. Tell me, I want to know how severe what happened to you was, how long it lasted. And the reason I want to know that is because I want to understand why it was that you became apprehensive when puberty

hit. Because you can tell as much of the story as necessary to explain your anxiety as far as you're concerned. Yeah. So just to put it bluntly, I was raped multiple times. So when I was coming to 11, 12, and I started learning about sex ed and figuring out what sex was, I sort of started to unpack what had happened to me. And that was fully sort of when I was able to understand what actually happened. Yeah, okay.

So you know, there were early psychoanalytic theories about anorexia, for example, and one of the theories, and I'm not vouching for the validity of this theory, but it's an interesting approach, and I think sometimes it's valid, is that some of the impetus for anorexia for some women, for some girls, particularly those who were sexually abused, was the attempt to forestall puberty. And because of apprehension around the emergence of sexual capability, let's say, and also the possibility of sexual capability, let's say, and also the possibility of sexual predation. And you can imagine just generally that it is perfectly reasonable for young women to

be apprehensive about puberty because new dangers emerge. Now there's actually a biological response to that, you know, so I don't know if your therapist told you this or your physicians, but it's necessary to know. So boys and girls under the age of puberty don't differ much in their proclivity for negative emotion, anxiety and depression, okay? At puberty, that changes. This is cross-culturally stable and it's mostly biological. And we know that because the differences are most pronounced in gender equal societies. Right, okay.

Women become more anxious and depressed than men, more sensitive to negative emotion at puberty and that never goes away. And so then you might ask why? Well, sexual vulnerability makes the world a dangerous place for women. Then you might say, well, women also have to take care of infants, so being threat-sensitive is reasonable, because they can, they're going to be more sensitive to dangers to their baby, but they also become sexually vulnerable. Right? And their boys and men become physically more, much more powerful than women at that point too. So it appears as though what nature does to address that imbalance is

increase the negative emotion that women feel that happens at puberty. Okay, but there's one more twist to that. And I'd like to know if any of this was explained to you because it should have been. The typical pattern that negative emotion takes in young women is body, bodily concern. And it's partly because women are evaluated for better or worse, in consequence of their physical appearance. And so it's very commonly the case that if a woman is anxious and depressed, is experiencing

high levels of negative emotion, that expresses itself as hyper-concern about bodily appearance. Now, when you were brought, when you were little, maybe you don't remember even, but how much of that was explained to you? None of that was explained to you? None of that was okay So so one of the things I'd like to point out to everyone watching is There's no excuse for not explaining this if you're a physician who's trained well enough to dare To meddle in someone's gender identity And if you're a counselor who's counseling someone who hypothetically has gender dysphoria

Especially someone female, then these are elementary facts. The first thing you do when you deal with someone who is anxious and depressed when they're female and they're entering puberty is to explain this. It's psychology, I wouldn't call it 101, it's developmental psychology 101. And so that's minimum necessary information.

Now there's a reason that that should be explained to you, you know. So it's very frequently the case that people who are having psychological trouble, so excess anxiety and depression, let's say, they feel like they're the only people who are in that boat. So they feel isolated and alone and sort of singled out. And part of the reason you explain the prevalence of a given diagnosis even to someone is to say, you're not alone, this isn't unique to you, in fact, it's quite common.

These are the symptoms that are commonly associated with it. These are the reasons for the symptoms. And well, in the case of the symptoms that you described, the typical pattern is that even adolescents who are radically gender dysphoric adapt by the time they're 18. At least 80% of them. This has been known for, well, I'd say four decades, five decades. It's been known a long time.

It's been replicated many times. It's a very stable finding. So the reliable clinicians and physicians have concluded, especially before all of this got politicized, that if a child is severely gender dysphoric, the best thing to do is nothing until they're 18. Most of them are, what would you say, reconciled to their fate by that point.

And that's also not that atypical because puberty throws a monkey wrench into everyone's works. Now, you were at particular risk for that and you said why. Now when you went and saw Olsen Kennedy and the counselor, tell me her name again. Susan Landon. Susan Landon. Susan Landon, right. Did you tell them about the abuse? I did not, but they didn't ask.

So they didn't know about that, but they didn't ask. So what kind of history did they take from you? We had very brief discussions about my childhood, and I expressed that I'd always felt sort of uncomfortable with girls, and that I had mostly male friends, and I talked about my discomfort with the idea of growing into being a grown woman. That was sort of the very surface level conversations we had and I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria on our first meeting but I had only been-

Diagnosed by who? Olsen Kennedy. And- How long was the diagnostic meeting approximately? It was around 30 minutes to an hour. Olsen Kennedy. How long was the diagnostic meeting, approximately? It was around 30 minutes to an hour. It was pretty short and she spoke with my parents as well. But by the time I was diagnosed, I had only been living as trans for about three months,

but the diagnostic criteria is actually six months. So with Olsen Kennedy, how many times did you see her? How many times did you have the chance to have a clinical discussion with her of some length? We had multiple clinical discussions. I don't actually know how many times I saw her, but all the talk about gender was never beyond social setting. It was never about how I was feeling. It was more about how I wanted to be perceived. Okay, now you said when you first went and saw her,

and then how long after you saw her, like what was the sequence of events that led you to Landon? Right, I believe it was pretty shortly after, maybe a month or so, I started seeing Landon because she had referred me to her. And we had sort of similar discussions and she kept affirming the idea that I was somehow inherently male and that was the root of my discomfort.

Yeah, well, there's been a variety. See, that's a tricky issue, because in Canada, for example, and I'm familiar with this because I'm Canadian, although it's the same in many places in the United States. The standard of care is gender affirmation, the legal standard of care, the professional standard of care, which is appalling. It's appalling. And what that means is that I believe it's actually a felony in Canada for a psychologist or a physician or

anyone else for that matter, anyone operating in a professional capacity to question, let's say your feelings. Now the problem with that is, well you know what the problem is, but the problem is what if you're confused? Now virtually every adolescent is confused. So then the question is, if you come to me and I'm a physician or a therapist and you said you'd been living as trans and so there's evidence already that you decided to, that you decided you were in the wrong body so to speak, you're acting that out in some ways, I have to step down carefully

not to actually do something illegal or sufficiently unprofessional, so to speak, that my license could be at risk. So we're increasingly in a situation where the probability that someone like you at 12 would be told the truth is zero. And this is independent of the actual, let's say, professional knowledge of the physician or counselor. So, for example, we might ask why you weren't given this elementary information that I described.

I think that should have just happened baseline, because that has nothing to do with your feelings. But then it is the case that the physicians and the therapist would have to tread on very thin ice indeed to ask you any questions of any sort. So I'm not trying to excuse this, I'm trying to outline for people who are listening and you why such things might happen. Now with Olsen Kennedy, there's some evidence that she's a fairly avid advocate of the gender affirming process. And so that's a slightly different situation. Okay, so tell me exactly what you think the discussions consisted of with Olsen Kennedy and then also with the therapist? It was very, very surface level and it was all about what I wanted in the future,

which for me at the time was very difficult to figure out. And obviously I just kind of my dream was I wanted to just be totally dissociated from my body, which is not really a healthy mindset at all. But I didn't really, I wasn't 100% certain if I was like truly male, if that was the truth, but they kept affirming that my discomfort with my body was related to the fact that I was supposed to be born male. And that because I fit in better with males at school

or things like that, that that was somehow also evidence. Yeah, okay, first of all, that's not evidence, right? I mean, some boys, it's a minority as it is with girls, but a minority of boys are more comfortable associating with girls, and that also might be situation dependent. And it's, I think, even more common that girls are more comfortable associating with boys. But that in itself is absolutely 100% no determinant marker of which gender you are. So, I mean, otherwise it would be impossible for boys and girls to have cross-sex

friendships without their biological identity being cast into question. Okay, so you didn't talk much about the past. Now, all right, you said that you'd been living transgender for a few months before you went and saw Olson Kennedy. Yes. Okay, so what did that mean? What did that mean? What were you doing? I had spoken to my guidance counselor about my feelings about my body, and I had suggested that I might be transgender to her, but I had also said that I might be lesbian or bisexual or things like that. We just had a lot of like very open-ended conversations.

But at a certain point, she sort of latched on to the idea that I might be transgender. And after that meeting, she called my parents and told them, and they're the ones who took me to Olson Kennedy. However, pretty shortly after that conversation with my parents, it was actually my guidance counselor who told my entire school that I was a boy and that they were to only use male

pronouns for me and that all the teachers had to call me by a different name. And at the time, it kind of felt nice in a way that I didn't have to really do any of it myself, but it also really removed any accountability on my end because I had really no actual control over the decision and I didn't have to have those conversations face to face with my parents or my peers as well. So it was taken out of your hands. Essentially. But you also implied in the run up to that statement that part of your motivation was

to have it taken out of your hands because it wasn't something that you particularly wanted to deal with. No, and I also, when I was living as trans at that point before I had gone through with any medicalization, I had just cut my hair short and was wearing baggy clothes, which I was also doing because my body was changing. Right, right, right. But people, and what were people calling you at that point?

People were calling me Kai at the time. Kai. And the school was informed that you were now male? Yes. Okay. And what you said, you correct me if I get any of this wrong, because I want to get it right while I'm talking to you. You said that was a relief to you fundamentally. Yeah. Was it only a relief to you fundamentally? At the moment, yeah. Was it only a relief? No, it was definitely mixed emotions because also I was a bit overwhelmed at the same time because everything happened so fast.

I mean, it was just like three months at that time. So how did that change your status at school? First of all, before that, before you started talking to the guidance counselor and so forth, how would you describe your social status, let's say, at school? Yeah, at school I was, I wouldn't call myself popular, but I had friends and people liked me. I was fairly well-liked. I was definitely, as I hit puberty, I was getting more awkward and definitely more reserved and shy.

Going through puberty definitely triggered something in me that was kind of noticeable from other people around me. Right. And when I originally came out as transgender, I lost a ton of friends sort of immediately. But after a year or so, I started getting way more popular than I had ever been while living as female.

Why? I think it was because of the sort of initial confidence boost that I had, but also I definitely felt more comfortable asserting myself in ways that are traditionally masculine that I was sort of reserved from before. Definitely just because I was insecure and shy, I don't think that my trans identity benefited me in any way. But I did notice that people started to respect me more. Okay, so let me take that apart a little bit

because you could imagine, when did you start taking testosterone? Started taking testosterone at 13. What was the effect of you, what was the effect on you of the drug? Pretty quickly my voice started to deepen a bit and I started to grow facial hair. My stature changed. I got a bit more confident and I was very restless and angry all the time. As my dose increased, I started having very, very negative side effects that eventually

sort of diverged into full-blown psychosis. But at the time that I was 13, that wasn't happening yet. Do you think that the changes that testosterone induced had anything to do with your shift in social status? Absolutely. Okay, how? I think once I started to physically conform to the male identity, it was easier for people to see me that way, which also definitely made

me feel better in a short-term sense, but it didn't actually resolve any of the mental problems I was experiencing. Okay, when did you or did you ever start to discuss what had happened to you when you were six? Yeah, I started to discuss that around 17 with a different therapist. Oh, so it was quite a while after this. It was a while, yeah. Why the lag, and then why did you decide to delve into it? Well, I had sort of assumed that my transition

would fix all of those issues, because that's sort of what I was told, is that my body issues would resolve, and that once I started fitting in better at school, I'd feel less shy. And that did sort of happen, but I also got more reckless and more depressed and more anxious and I could hardly sleep and things like that were just happening. And it got so bad by the time I was 17, I could hardly focus in school. I was up all night, every single night. My insomnia had become psychosis.

And I was having full-blown hallucinations. Auditory or visual? Visual and auditory. Mostly auditory. It was like hearing voices and whispers and shouting from the other room. What sort of things were the whispers saying? It was a lot of... This is all in my therapist notes, but it was a lot of stuff about hurting other people and specifically men, which was something

I had actually talked to Landon about, and she attributed to my trans identity. Do you have an alternative attribution? I think that it was because of the sexual abuse that I experienced. Well, that would be the obvious. Yeah. I think that it was because of the sexual abuse. Well, that would be the obvious. Right. Do you remember, as I said before we started the interview, you don't have to answer any of these questions, right? So do you remember what the voices were telling you?

Certain things would be if I had positive relationships with people, I would always be told to hurt those people or say certain things. In class, it would always be like, you have to get out of here, you have to run or like things like that. Lots of like whisperings that would overlap at times. But it was always trying to get me to do things that were very impulsive. And sometimes I would do those things and I would act very impulsively or out of control or really high risk behaviors I was doing. Okay, and that that was all happening around 17? Yeah, around 16, 17. And has that resolved completely?

Completely. Okay, and how come? Why did it resolve? I went through DBT therapy and that sort of quieted most of my psychosis. However, I was still having some of it until… DBT being? ...dilectoral behavioral therapy. And after completing that, I was still having some of it until... DBT being? Dilectoral behavioral therapy. And after completing that, I was still having some of those symptoms.

But once I was fully detoxed off the testosterone, I stopped having hallucinations. Right. So, there is some benefit to the psychological treatment. If you had to guess or maybe you know, was the primary benefit with regard to the psychosis symptoms a consequence of the psychological treatment or the cessation of testosterone? I would say it was definitely both, but I would say the cessation of the testosterone stopped the psychosis. Okay, so if I've got this right, you didn't discuss the sexual abuse with Olsen Kennedy

or Landon. And then that was forestalled until you were 17. And the reason you didn't discuss it is because you thought that you had an alternative route. Had you ever revealed anything about the sexual abuse to your parents? No. So this was all happening in secret. Did the teachers know? So, do you know why you didn't, why you weren't able to or didn't discuss what had happened

with your parents? I think the main reason was because I was assaulted by somebody who was also a child at the time. They were much older, but they were still a child at the time. So I think in my head, I sort of have the narrative of like, if an adult hurts you, tell another adult. But I wasn't really considering that a child's actions could be that inappropriate where I'd have to tell somebody. But then by the time I had sort of realized what had happened, I was so ashamed and I felt like there was no way out of it or no way to tell anybody.

So I just figured I could resolve it in other ways, like transitioning. Right. Well, I'm not, look, I'm also not suggesting at all that, you know, there was a more appropriate route to dealing with this. It's very, very complicated than what you just said. Well, there's moral quandaries and you pointed them out. When is it appropriate to go to an authority? You said you were ambivalent about that.

And then you had other reasons for not revealing it. And it's a very complicated thing to reveal. Yeah. Like, how do you talk about it? It's very, it still kind of eludes me in how I talk about it. Like, I just sort of got desensitized to talking about it at a certain point, which weirdly helped, but the first time I could barely even get the words out. Were you guilty about it?

I felt very guilty. And especially after all of the transition and all of the things that I had done to just avoid dealing with this, there was a lot of shame in finally coming out and saying the reason. Why were you guilty, do you think? I don't know. Well, you know, if you're confused, if you're deeply confused about something, part of what confusion is, is the experience of a very large number of emotions. Yeah.

Because part of the way you resolve the confusion is to experience a panoply of emotions to see which ones fit. That could be shame, anger, guilt, rage, pain, anxiety. What else? Curiosity, excitement, all of those, that's all part of being deeply confused. And while you had reason to be confused, okay, so you had to keep this to yourself. And it started to happen to you when you were very young. And so now I asked you if you'd discussed this with your physician or your therapist, and

you said no, not until you were 17. But you also mentioned that the conversations that you had with the therapist and the physician were fundamentally centered on what you wanted in the future. Well, how much investigation into your history took place? Very little because the second we got into my history, I mean, it just came crumbling down. Like even in my surgical note for my double mastectomy, in my referral, it says that I had held a male identity since childhood, which is just not true. I was a super girly child. I did choir and theater. I would play dress up, I collected dolls. I just had no sign of this until puberty.

Besides just physical discomfort with my body and just feeling disconnected from girls, there was really no sign of prior gender dysphoria. Discomfort with your body and feeling disconnected from girls, that's called puberty. Right, exactly. Right, right. Now, it might have been, as we already discussed, it might have been exaggerated in your case, likely exaggerated in your case, at least the discomfort and the confusion, and perhaps some resistance to the process.

I mean, that seems like in some ways self-evident, given that what you just said, but very little of that, very little of what you just described deviates from what's strictly normative and expected. Right. Okay, and so you said you also didn't provide a history that indicated that prolonged dysphoria that in principle is associated with being born in the wrong body. Right. It's a very strange conceptualization, but one that you can imagine these sorts of things

being more justifiable in the case of someone who has that kind of lengthy history, but it wasn't the case with you. No, they almost, it seemed like they didn't really wanna talk about my childhood, or as if my childhood was totally irrelevant to what was happening now, and it was just something that I hadn't seen before or my parents hadn't seen before because there really were no signs

when I was a child. Okay. Now, let's talk about your parents a little bit. So now, you're dressing as a boy at school or at least dressing in, were you dressing as a boy? How were you dressing? I was just wearing baggy clothes. It wasn't really dressing like a boy at school, or at least dressing in, were you dressing as a boy? How were you dressing? I was just wearing baggy clothes. It wasn't really dressing like a boy. It was just big shirts and big pants. Okay. Okay. Right. Well, that's also not uncommon early pubescent female behavior.

Right. Right. Right. Okay. And you talked to a guidance counselor at school, and the guidance counselor, you said, focused in on gender dysphoria and your hypothetical identity as a boy as a resolution to your confusion. Yes. And then it was taken out of your hands by, in some ways, by the turns of events

that emerged in consequence. The announcement of your pronouns. Now, and then you said you lost a variety of friends. Why? I think a lot of people were sort of uncomfortable with what was happening. And I also had people at the time point out how out of character this was or how like, I had never behaved typically masculine before, or I hadn't really expressed interest in masculine things and things like that. People brought it up to me and were very aware of how out of character it was. Right. So a lot of the people that had been associating with you didn't know what the hell was going on and they didn't know what to do.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's enough to cause collapse of friendship right there, because, well, one of the characteristics of friendships is that you know the person and you know what to do. Okay, so then you had some period of time, I presume after that, where your social status was ambivalent, and then it switched

in a more positive direction. Yeah. Yeah, well see, one of the complicating factors, of course, too, is that once you start to take testosterone, think about testosterone is that it can quell anxiety and depression as a pharmacological agent, right? So that makes differential diagnosis of its effects very complex because you could say, well, the reason that you're not as depressed and anxious as you were is because you finally found your true identity. Or you could just point out that it's a side effect of testosterone. And it's very difficult to separate those. Yeah, for example, I was crying all the time before the testosterone and then

after I stopped crying and I just wouldn't have these fits of crying. And in my mind I was like, oh, that means it's working. I'm getting better. Right, right. Yeah. Right, right. Okay. So the sequence is 12 years old, 11.

When do you start dressing in this ambivalent fashion and your name changes? Is that 11? Yeah, or 12. Okay. But it's also a 12 that you put on puberty blockers. Yeah. Okay, so describe the route to puberty blockers and the duration it took from first contact with the physician to diagnosis and prescription. It was about three months between coming out as trans and then being seen by Dr. Olson.

And Dr. Olson recommended puberty blockers immediately, but it took a few months for her to convince my parents to agree to it. Okay. What do you mean by immediately? She immediately asserted that I was definitely trans and that puberty blockers would be the right path for me. And immediately is the first session? Yeah, after the first time we had spoken for about 30 minutes. And that's 30 to 60 minutes?

Yes. Okay. Now it takes some time to convince your parents. Okay. Do you have siblings? I do. I have a brother. Older or younger?

Older. Older. Okay. I'm just trying to situate you in the family. Okay, so now your parents, why do your parents take you to Olson Kennedy? My parents had definitely noticed that around puberty I got very reserved and shy and was acting sort of different. And they definitely noticed the signs of depression. It wasn't really severe, but they noticed that it was happening. And around that first meeting, Olson asserted that I would be at very high risk for suicide. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. And that immediately got them terrified for what would happen to me. Okay. So would you rather have a live trans kid or a dead kid? Those words exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So why did they take you to Olson Kennedy though, rather than to someone who specialized, let's say, in depression and anxiety? Was that, I'll just let you answer that first. Sure. Yeah. I mean, my guidance counselor had been the one to have this phone call with them, so I don't actually know. With the parent, with your parents. Yeah. I never got to tell my parents. Well, then that likely explains it. You said at school that you'd already started, you'd had conversations with the guidance

counselor and you'd already been set on this gender transition path. Right. So now your parents know you're depressed and anxious and that it's manifesting itself in this transition path. Then Olsen Kennedy becomes a logical person to go see. Right. So she tells your parents on the initial encounter that puberty blockers, that you're definitely a male and that

puberty blockers are the appropriate course of action. Yes. And that that reduces suicide risk. She also asserted that that was basically the only treatment available. Okay. There is no evidence of that suicide risk. That is a lie and it's a pathological and manipulative lie. I don't think that I've run across any deeper lie told by psychological counselors and medical

professionals than that gender-affirming care is the only alternative to suicide, the safest alternative to suicide for kids who have gender dysphoria. I don't think there's a shred of evidence anywhere in the clinical literature, no matter how you look at it, to support that conclusion. Right. So, okay, so now your parents are in a bind. Yeah. Okay, so what's happening with them?

You said it takes a few months. Tell me what happens. My parents were very reluctant originally and they were constantly like, I don't believe this. You have never expressed this before. And Olson would have conversations with me or conversations with them where I wasn't there or conversations with me separately. And then she'd talk to my parents.

I don't know exactly what was said, but I know it was just asserting the same rhetoric that I was at very high risk for suicide, that my depression was gonna get worse if they didn't act on this now. And it was also, there was a lot of social pressure put on me because Olson kept bringing up, keeping up with male peers

and keeping up with people in my class. Time is of the essence. Right, as if there was some need to act as quick as possible. How many times do you suppose you and your family were instructed by Olson Kennedy, let's say, that there was an ever-present risk of suicide, that that was real and immediate,

and that this was the appropriate treatment. How many times do you suppose that was discussed? That was something that was probably expressed to my parents every time my parents spoke to her. Got any estimate of a numeric? Probably a dozen. Okay. And you said as well that that was the only treatment pathway. That was the only treatment pathway. it was what she would assert.

You can imagine two models of unhappiness, right, that would be relevant in your case. One model would be your gender dysphoric because your identity is reversed, inverted, and the depression and anxiety are a consequence of that. Okay, there's a problem with that assumption. The problem is that there's almost no, let's say, psychiatric condition that isn't primarily depression and anxiety. Right. Right, because people don't go to consult with a physician or a psychiatrist or a psychologist unless they're miserable and afraid and unhappy, because why would they?

Narcissists, for example, very rarely go to see psychologists, because they're not particularly distressed by their condition. Same with criminals. Okay, so the logical inference pathway is that the primary disorder is depression and anxiety and then there may be secondary manifestations, but you have to be damn sure that the secondary manifestations are real before you make them, before you make the depression and anxiety secondary to that. So one alternative treatment in principle would have been treatment for depression and

anxiety directly. And then to see if the gender dysphoria resolves, let's say on its own. I'm not saying that would have been the only alternative, but it is the appropriate default alternative, especially when the alternatives are puberty blockers, which aren't trivial, hormonal transformation, which is a major medical and psychological intervention,

to say nothing of surgery, right? Because the other default position that psychiatrists, et cetera, physicians, surgeons should adopt is don't do anything harmful and permanent. Yeah. Right, okay. Okay, so now your parents are told that you're definitely a boy,

despite the fact that you've been feminine your whole life, and that if they don't do something, all hell might break loose. Yeah. And you're told you better get at it. Yeah. And that there's no alternative treatment. You're certain of this, eh?

That this is how it played out. Yeah. Okay. Okay, now I'll leave it at that. Okay, so now your parents, how do they come to a decision and what happens in your household? Well, that's occurring.

You implied that there was a fair bit of back and forth between you and your parents. Yeah. I mean, we didn't really fight too much. They were very distressed about it and they didn't want to agree, but they also felt kind of backed into a corner and they sort of felt a bit. The purpose of that threat is to back them into a corner. Exactly. That is the purpose of that threat.

Right. Because there's no clinical evidence for its validity, right? First of all, even the medical organizations that purport to address the long-term viability of gender-affirming treatment state that, partly because of prejudice against gender dysphoric people, there are no long-term studies. Well, you can't have it both ways. There's either no long-term studies or you don't know what the suicide risk is. Plus, there's an additional issue. People who are depressed and anxious are at higher risk for suicide. That doesn't mean that they're at higher risk for suicide

because they're gender dysphoric. Those are very separate issues. Yeah. Right. So, okay. So now your parents, they've been delivered a warning by a medic. What's the therapist doing at this time? She's sort of just reaffirming all my beliefs and every problem I had was attributed to the fact that I was somehow inherently born in the wrong body and that I was intrinsically male

and I should have been born in a different body and that's why I feel so anxious and that's why I hate school and that's why I can't focus and all my problems were attributed to my gender dysphoria. Yeah. Okay, so that's convenient for you in the short term. Right. In my mind, I'm thinking, oh, great, this is treatable. I found the problem. I found what's wrong with me.

Did you? Okay. This is a hard question. Not that the other ones haven't been. When you were thinking your private thoughts at this point, when you were listening to the therapists and the physicians, what did you believe? What did you doubt? I don't think I actually doubted much. I mean, I in my mind truly believed that this might be the answer. Hoped or believed? I think I hoped and I was waiting to see if it would resolve and it didn't eventually, but I was also kind of naively trusting them and assuming that this was right, especially because people around me.

Yeah, it's hard to tell how much of that's naive. The thing about being an adolescent is that you know how people are, they're always on the cases, on a teenager's case to not be so susceptible to peer pressure. It's actually, being susceptible to peer pressure is developmentally appropriate for a teenager. So imagine when you're a child, you're susceptible to the influence of your parents.

Okay, well, when you're a teenager, you're not ready to be on your own. Who should you be susceptible to? Well, obviously your peers. Why? Well, they're gonna be your community. So if you're a normal teenager, what your peers think matters.

Okay, so now you're already in a milieu at school where you've got your pronouns, you've got your pronouns, you've got your male identity, plus there are figures of authority who are driving that home. I don't think that the fact that you are susceptible to that is indicative of what I would describe as naivety. It's what you'd expect. The other thing that's useful to know is that, imagine that two things determine how you

respond in a situation. One might be your personality, your temperament, even your knowledge. The other might be the demands, the social demands of the situation. Okay, then you might ask for the typical person, which is the greater influence? And the answer is clearly the social influence. That's what it means to be social. So here's an example. People decide when they're not hungry by noticing when they've eaten the same amount of food

on the same size plates as everyone else at the table. So even something as biological as hunger and its satiety is actually mediated by social observation. Well, why? Well, you don't want to be the person who habitually eats all the food, right? You're not going to make yourself popular, especially when food is scarce. People are very sensitive to social pressure, pressure, norms. That's appropriate. Yeah. Okay, so now your situation is you're confused, well puberty does that, but you had additional reason, and now you've been delivered an identity and it's in your interest in a variety of

ways to accept that because it actually solves a complex problem in principle, which is what the hell you're supposed to do with your fear. And then people are promising that it's going to work. Then you also have this situation where, at least in potential, the testosterone is making you more confident. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think you should have necessarily expected yourself to sort that out.

I am curious though, and it's worth thinking through. Like, you told me already that you had a conflict. You knew there was something in the past, or did you? How much did you know that this thing in the past hadn't been addressed? I knew that it had happened and I was very aware of what happened, but I didn't think it was also something that needed to be addressed until probably around 16. And you said you figured that out because these other things didn't work? Because I was still, I had gone through the surgery, I had been on testosterone, I was fitting in much better as a teenage boy than I had been as a teenage girl and everything

was worse. I was so much worse off and I was so much more suicidal. Okay, and so that's, okay, so how did you come to the realization that it might have had something to do with the abuse? I didn't, I think I sort of just knew once I was looking at my life and looking at the way that I was acting

and I couldn't function properly, to put it bluntly, I figured there was something still going on that I hadn't done. Yeah, well, the thing is too, you know, you're also getting older during all this period of time, and that means that, you know, as you age and mature and gather more wisdom and are less naive even, let's say, you take a different view of things that happened to you in your past, right? So you can realize the significance, like, you know, what the hell is a six-year-old

going to do about understanding sexual abuse? Like, no, that's not going to happen. So then at what point do you start even seeing that it was abuse? And then at what point do you start, well, delving into its effects? Maybe you could make a case that you weren't ready or able to do that until you were 17, especially given that you had an alternate hypothesis and strategy at hand. Okay, so things are getting worse, and they got better, yes? Yes.

And then they got worse? Uh-huh. Okay, now, 12 years old, you're on puberty blockers. And what were the consequences of the puberty blockers? The puberty blockers made me kind of lightheaded all the time, so it also sort of put a little more pressure on me to start testosterone because I was sort of feeling the effects of having no estrogen or testosterone in my system, and I was getting hot flashes and just feeling kind of lightheaded.

But otherwise, it just stopped any breast development, which was causing me distress at the time. But it also sort of deformed the breast development that I did have. So in a way, it sort of relieved my discomfort with my breast, but it also made it a lot worse because then the tissue was somewhat deformed. You know, one of the questions looking at your history is like, when did you pass threshold? I know that it's relatively common for people who start taking puberty blockers to proceed to the surgical route. And that begs the question of like, when do you make the fatal decision, so to speak,

the big decision? And you might say, well, that's just before surgery. You might say it's just before testosterone. You might say it's just before puberty blockers. So as far as you're concerned, if you had to decide, when did you make the determining decision? At what point? The decision to have surgery? Yeah, the decision to…

Well, the decision to see this all the way through, let's say. I think it was around when I started testosterone and I started noticing my voice dropping and noticing that people were starting to just respect me a little bit more now that I looked more physiologically male. Once that happened and I was sort of fitting in socially as male, but then I was looking at my body and just seeing the disconnect. And then because of the puberty blockers, the deformities of my breast tissue was causing me so much discomfort. So it was really that sort of immediately after I started testosterone at 13.

So you're trapped between fish and foul at that point. Right. Okay, okay. And so, tell me how you were evaluated before the surgery, you're 14. There's two things I want to know. How you were evaluated before the surgery. And then, what you think of now about the fact that you were giving consent for that surgery, or for the puberty blockers, puberty blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and then a double mastectomy at 14. So no medical procedures are supposed to be administered without informed consent. And informed means you got all the information, and consent means you understand what the

hell you're doing. So evaluation before the double mastectomy, what kind of evaluation did you understand what the hell you're doing. Okay, so evaluation before the double mastectomy, what kind of evaluation did you get from the surgeons? Well, the two people who wrote my referral letters were Olson and Landon, so I hardly had any extra psychological evaluation because they just wrote the letters because they'd already been seeing me

and they didn't really ask me much additional questions. And then when I went in for surgery, I had already had everything scheduled. I was already cleared for surgery. So I traveled to San Francisco just because it was recommendation of Olson, the specific doctor. And by the time I was there- Why the specific doctor? Because he doesn't have age limits or BMI requirements and- No age limits. Yeah.

And that's part of Olson Kennedy in principle, from what I understand, opposes, what does she call it? It's not blockade exactly. Gatekeeping. Gatekeeping. Yeah, that's the word they use. Right. And those who oppose gatekeeping assume that more harm is done the longer the delay.

Yes. Right. Right. Which I wish I had been delayed because at 14 I was really, really impulsive and not thinking things through. You know what that's called? Being 14. Yeah, that's exactly what that's called.

Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, by the time I was being evaluated for surgery, it was already the next day, it was already scheduled, they were drawing markings on me, and they just sort of briefly went over what the procedure was. It was just called top surgery, not thermosectomy. I didn't know even what breast tissue looked like.

I think it's important to realize how desensitizing they make everything. I don't think I realized the actual damage I did to my body until much, much later on. I mean, calling it top surgery doesn't even really acknowledge that there are specific glands there that are organs. Yeah, it's as vague a term as you could possibly invent. As vague and harmless a term. Yeah, right.

And that's purposeful and motivated, like bottom surgery, which is... although it's difficult for things to be worse, that's worse. Yeah. So, okay, now you said, okay, top surgery, now you're marked up and you're ready to go, you already have some ambivalence about the way that you appear. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. And now the surgeons have decided that you've

already been cleared by the people who need to clear you for surgical appropriateness. Okay. I guess one of the things you're going to discover legally is how much additional responsibility surgeons have to ensure that the people that they're relying on to clear people for top surgery have done their jobs properly. What's interesting about my case too is even in my referral notes, which the surgeon saw, there's conflicting information. One of them says I had held a male identity since puberty and the other one said I'd had a strong male identity since early childhood.

So immediately, like you can tell it's sort of rubber stamped and they didn't really look through it because if they looked through it, they'd see that glaring contradiction. And you have those records. Yes. Okay. So now you wake up after surgery. Yeah. What's that like? I felt like I'd been hit by a car.

Like I didn't even, going into surgery I was not nervous. I was totally calm. I had zero feelings about what was even going to happen. And I wasn't even shaking. What do you mean zero feelings? I was so numb at that point and I think I just didn't really, I was so dissociated as well. What do you mean dissociated?

I wasn't living in my body. I wasn't thinking of myself as part of my body. I was totally disconnected from my physical being and I think my identity. Do you know what derealization is? Yes. Yeah. How come? How come you know that?

I've heard about it from psychologists I've spoken to. Okay, so that's your state of mind going into surgery? Essentially, yeah. And it was pretty glaringly obvious in my opinion. I was smiling and bubbly. I had no nerves. I had no questions, nothing to ask. And when I woke up, obviously all of that was gone.

I was just in tremendous pain and very out of it physically. Okay, what's been the consequence of the surgery? Well, I didn't have breasts and I have a lot of chest pain related to hormonal cycles from the tissue that was left over, which is pretty painful to this day. And it wasn't something I even realized until I fully stopped testosterone because once I stopped testosterone and my hormonal cycle was able to somewhat regulate, then I started having really intense chest pain related to my hormonal cycles. When you stopped testosterone, did you re-undergo female puberty?

What happened? I wasn't sure what would have happened if I stopped, so I had talked about it with doctors and they were like, we don't know. But I sort of progressed a little bit through female puberty, but mostly no changes, just sort of slight redistribution of fat and things like that. Do you know what your reproductive status is? I don't know. How was the issue of your reproductive status dealt with by your physician, your

counselor and your surgeon? It was always brushed over by people. It was always something like, oh, well, how could you worry about that when this child is suicidal? It's what they would sort of, how they would deal with it with my parents, who would always bring up, well, what about future fertility? They'd be like, well, that's not important when we're dealing with something so great. So the crisis justifies pregnancy.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. And what about sexual function? How was that dealt with and discussed? That was also something that wasn't really brought up as a concern. And then later on, I had to go on topical estrogen as well. And that was also something that wasn't really brought up

as a potential thing that I would need to do in the future. Why did you have to go on topical estrogen? Because of vaginal atrophy. How much did you understand when you were 14, do you think? And let's try to give the devil his due, right? Because you'll have to do that in court, for example. Like, how much of that, how much do you think you understood Right? Because you'll have to do that in court, for example. How much do you think you understood of what you were doing in terms of its permanence

and significance? At the time, I truly believed that I would become male and that this would somehow fix all my problems, which is so not accurate to what was actually happening. So I say I understood basically nothing of what was actually going on and what was actually chemically happening to my body. I didn't really understand hormonal cycles and how much that plays into emotions. Did you have any, how did you reconcile the, I mean you had your, you had top surgery, but you didn't have bottom surgery. So how did you reconcile that obvious difference between you and the man you were supposed to become?

Yeah. And how was that dealt with by your physician, your therapist and your surgeon? It was something that was always sort of like, well, you can fix that. Like I was thinking about bottom surgery when I was a teenager. It was brought up to me by therapists and I had been thinking about it and researching it and you know by the time I was 16, 17 and I was breaking down in ways that were unrelated to my gender, I started getting help and my gender dysphoria was just gone after that. I just felt no desire to keep doing it or no reason to continue presenting as male after

I had sort of gone through therapy about the sexual abuse, but prior to that. That helped. Yeah. Okay, so that's interesting. Yeah. So, oh, hmm. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit. Sure.

Because I guess that's associated, because one of the things we haven't discussed is, well, why did you de-transition? Yeah. Right? And you've made some reference to that now, I think. Okay, so now, I guess we'll just keep walking through it chronologically. You've undergone surgery, but not bottom surgery, let's say, but that's in principle offering itself in the future. Okay, so now what happens?

Was there any reconciliation of your discomfort about how your upper body appeared? No. After top surgery, not really. I mean, the problem of I have breasts was gone, but also at the end of that, I was also thinking, well, I didn't really need to do that because they were already somewhat deformed anyways and I still don't like the way that I look and I still feel uncomfortable. So that didn't really resolve, but at the time I was sort of done transitioning. So I was in this place of like, I don't really know where to go next and things are just

getting worse and it just kept getting worse. Okay. And you're 15 now? Yeah, I was 14, 15. Okay. Now, when do you find another therapist? 16, 17, I believe. Okay. And you said that that was effective. Yes.

Okay. Tell me that story. Well, I had sort of started opening up and realizing I needed to deal with a lot of the sexual trauma that I had. Opening up to who? I had talked a little bit to my parents about it and sort of just came to terms with it in my own head. So you revealed some of it to them? Yes. How did they react?

Vaguely. I revealed some of it and they were very, very concerned and very distressed. And I think they immediately sort of questioned why I was in gender therapy. They immediately wanted to put me in treatment for sexual assault only. Oh, I see. Okay. So once they had the other details, they could put two and two together.

Right. And so they encouraged you to find another therapist? They helped, how did that play out? They helped me find another therapist. They helped you, okay. So you found another therapist. Why didn't you, why did you find a different therapist? Because the therapy that I was doing was so surface level and wasn't actually addressing any issues in my mind. It was just creating more issues and giving me- Why did you come to that conclusion?

Because they kept affirming that I was somehow intrinsically male and that would solve all my problems. And then once I matched the outward appearance of a male and I didn't feel better, they had no answers for me. I see, okay, okay. And then you open up to, okay, so then you start more deeply considering the potential effect of the sexual abuse.

Yes. Then you talk to your parents, then they help you find another therapist. Right. Okay. How does that therapist differ from the previous therapist? That therapist barely spoke about my gender. We didn't even discuss it.

We've talked about it maybe once. We went over it and I said, yeah, I've been trans identified. And then we just sort of only really dealt with my childhood trauma, my sexual assault. How was your new therapist trained? What was their specialty? DBT and CBT were their therapies. PhD psychologist? Yes. Do you know where they were trained? I'm and CBT were their therapies. PhD psychologist?

Yes. Do you know where they were trained? I'm not sure. Okay, fine. But PhD psychologist? Yeah, PhD psychologist. Okay, okay. And it was a more behavior therapy oriented approach.

Okay, so, and what did they do with you? We went through dialectural behavioral therapy, and then I also did something called imaginal exposure therapy, which sort of helped me remember a lot of the gaps that I didn't actually have filled in and then once we did that we just did a lot of general talk therapy. Okay, why do you think that, what did you talk about that you think was helpful? The number one thing that I think was helpful that we talked about is how that experience from childhood made me think about what it meant to be female and what external factors. And what did you conclude?

I concluded that I had been attributing a lot of self-hatred to femaleness. I had been putting a lot of my own experiences onto femaleness as a whole, and I had been taking that out of myself for a very long time. So femaleness as the cause of your suffering. Yes. Okay, okay. And this therapist was effective. Yeah, very.

Okay, and so what were the consequences for your symptoms of depression and anxiety? Just really resolved pretty quickly. I mean, I still was... Any medication associated with that? I was on medication when I was 15. I started being put on antipsychotics and antidepressants. Oh yeah. That was when you were still taking testosterone?

Yes. So you went off the testosterone? Yeah. You went off the psych meds before you went to therapy? No. I went off the psych meds around the time I was going to therapy with a second therapist and then I stopped testosterone after that. But your depression and anxiety resolved, even though you stopped taking testosterone.

Yes. Why? I think the main factor was definitely the testosterone because… Okay, so that quelled the psychosis. That quelled the psychosis. Why do you think your depression and anxiety went away? I think it was because I was actually going through therapy that was actually talking about my issues and not just...

Right, so you think you got to the cause, the actual cause. How did you resolve it? I mean, you had reason to blame your field maleness, so to speak, because that did make you vulnerable in that way. So how did you and your therapist, what reconfiguration of the way you looked at things worked for you? I started really focusing on what I wanted my life to look like on my terms and not just how I could fit into other things. And started trying to focus on more goal-oriented things

rather than letting my mental problems be the main focus of my life. How did you discover what your goals were? oriented things rather than letting my mental problems be the main focus of my life. How did you discover what your goals were? Yeah, we just sort of talked about things I like and things I'm really passionate about beyond gender, beyond my mental health issues and what I really love doing and that gave me sort of a focus. What did you discover? I mean, I love theater, I love literature and that gave me a lot of drive to go to school

as well. How did you or did you and if so configure your view of being female? I mean that sort of came second in a way because we were going through this whole therapy process and not really talking about my gender at all. And then sort of after I was done with therapy, I'm in college, I'm much better off and that's when I came to the decision I wanted to de-transition because I had built a life around me that had nothing to do with my gender and I had reconciled with my own problems. And that's sort of when I came to the conclusion that there was no reason to keep presenting

as male. That's a complicated realization. I mean, you had to... Okay, that really requires some unpacking because that's actually really hard. You know, if you wait 40 minutes for a bus that's supposed to be there in five minutes, it gets harder and harder to move away from the bus stop because you've already invested 40 minutes, right?

That's the sunk cost fallacy. Well, you had a social community around you at school that established your identity. Your parents had gone through hell and you as well along the way to establish this new identity. You took puberty blockers. You took testosterone. Then you had surgery. How in the world did you reconcile yourself to the realization that that was not right.

Yeah. Because like you'd put a lot in, there was a lot at stake. Yeah. So how did you do that? It was really, really difficult. And once I sort of started to think about it and think about, do I really want to do this? And skipping injections and missing testosterone doses.

And just everything around me sort of came crashing down and I just started feeling this tremendous grief about what I had just done. It was really jarring. No doubt. No doubt. But even that could be an impediment to like admission that the path was wrong. I mean, there's a lot of things you have to realize that the path was wrong. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things you have to realize that the path was wrong. Your parents were deceived, that would be part of the realization. You were hurt and damaged in consequence of it. There's all these years that you spent in limbo, at least, that were misapplied. You have to admit that not only you were wrong, so to speak, but everyone around you was wrong,

including the authorities, the so-called authorities, which means that now your relationship to authority is also altered. I still don't exactly understand how you managed it. The therapist helped? Yeah, the therapist helped. OK, now partly because you said that you were focused on some things that you actually wanted to do. Right, yeah. That weren't gender related.

No. You started to plot out a pathway into the future? Right. I started to think about things other than myself and thinking about school and what I wanted for my future, which led me to the conversation in my own head of, do I want kids one day? Which also helped with that realization. Okay, so what did you realize?

I wanted kids and I could not picture myself as someone's father and I really tried to picture it. Oh, okay, that's interesting. And she felt wrong. Yeah, I talked to another young woman who, she didn't go as far down the path as you did, but one of the things that stopped her eventually, she started living as a boy at school and

she didn't let her parents know, but she was on the path. And then they found out. But one of her realizations was she said she fantasized about being a father, let's say, or about being an adult male at some point in the future and thought, no. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So had you not done that before? No. What, was there no projection into the future that far? No. Yeah, well that's not atypical either, you know.

Like, I've worked with adolescents, young adolescents, trying to get them to plan out their future to some degree. By the time you're in your early 20s, you might be able to do that for five years into the future. My sense with 13 and 14 year olds was a few months into the future is a long ways, and even tomorrow is quite a distance. And that's part of cortical maturation too, right? The more you mature cortically, the longer time span you can take into account. So you just hadn't projected yourself that far into the future? No, I just couldn't picture it in my mind really. Right, but then you started to become able to do that.

Yeah, once I was older and actually like in college and thinking about my future in a way that was more tangible, it started to hit me. Two things I guess I'm curious about now is why the lawsuit, three things, why the lawsuit, why the podcast and who else have you talked to broadly publicly, why the podcast and also then maybe finally your attitude towards being female now. Yeah, the lawsuit specifically is because Olsen Kennedy and she said this in countless interviews and talked about this very openly. She doesn't believe in gatekeeping and she's very open about how she doesn't think it's possible that mental health comorbidities could ever affect

someone's gender identity. And I just want to say that that is so wrong and that's directly hurt and ruined in my eyes, my life. And I think that that approach to healthcare is so dangerous. And it's not just dangerous, it's malpractice, at least in cases like mine. And I think the reason for talking about it so publicly is I also just want to spread awareness that this does happen.

People like to act like this never happens or no children transition, but that's not true. Yes, it's seriously not true. Right. And while it's worse than that, because as I pointed out at the beginning of this interview, it's illegal and unprofessional. If this was a clinical interview, what I did in this interview would be illegal and unprofessional. Right, it'd be enough to get me barred from my practice. In fact, my practice is actually under threat for questioning exactly this kind of process. Yeah, well it stops. I was in a fortunate position to some degree because I'm not dependent on my professional status for my financial support or for that of my family.

But most people don't have that option. So that means I would have to lie to you. And that's not good, to say the least. Because the last thing you need when you're 12 and confused is some idiot professional lying to you, especially when they're trying to justify their own ideological stance. Right. Okay, so when did you publicly announce the lawsuit and what have you done publicly on

the detransition front? Have you spoken and interacted with other detransitioners? Yeah, I've spoken to some detransitioners, mostly like online or just phone calls. And that's been really nice to hear that other people have also gone through this. Even though I'm sad that they've also gone through this, it's nice that I'm not alone. The lawsuit came out, I believe December 6th, but I had spoken to Billboard Chris a bit before that, pretty publicly. It's quite the effective troublemaker.

Yeah, so that got a lot of attention and I just sort of outlined my entire story in that short little street interview. Yeah, how'd you meet him? It was totally coincidental. I was walking home on UCLA campus and I just saw him. Oh, so you just bumped into him. Yeah.

Tell everybody who Billboard Chris is first. Billboard Chris is awesome and he just stands around with a billboard and has conversations with people about puberty blockers. And I just totally ran into him and we had a nice conversation. Now he's a Canadian. Yes. And he travels all over the world doing this, standing on sidewalks. Yeah.

And often being harassed. Yeah. Yeah. He's quite the strange character. Yeah. And often being harassed. Yeah. Yeah, he's quite the strange character. Yeah. And he's obviously very committed to this. Okay, so you just happened to bump into him. Yeah. Okay, so tell that story.

Well, I'd seen his stuff online before and I'd seen him be harassed and had coffee thrown at him and I just wanted to tell him, like, as somebody directly impacted by puberty blockers, I really appreciated what he was doing. And then he just asked about my story and we sort of had a conversation about it. And it got a lot more attention than I was expecting because I had had that conversation weeks before the lawsuit was supposed to come out. So I wasn't really supposed to be talking too much. So I tried to keep it vague when talking to him, but it got a lot of attention and it was nice to see that other people were so sympathetic to my story.

Why do you think it got attention? I mean, he gets some attention. He definitely gets attention on his own. But no, it was, I think that's actually where I became aware of you. I think that's, I think it was that event that triggered my reaching out to you initially. You know, I found out afterwards about the lawsuit and that it was also aimed at Olson Kennedy, who's someone I'm interested in for a variety of reasons. But I think it was that Billboard Chris interview. So why do you think, what's your understanding

of why that was so widely viewed and attended to? I said Olsen Kennedy's name and that was right after that information had come out about her hiding the study. And it was also, I think, just because of my age at the time that these things happened, it was definitely drawing to hear. Right. Yeah. Right. Yes, well, you're also quiet and soft-spoken and eminently reasonable in your public presentation.

And so that probably didn't hurt. Right. So, right. Okay. So, the lawsuit. Are you mounting that? Are your parents? How is is that progressing and how is it supported? It's expensive. How are you doing this? I'm mounting that mostly, but I'm working with some awesome law firms and I'm working with Campbell Miller Payne. All they do is detransition lawsuits. They work with Prisha Mosley as well and other clients who are also detransitioners. So that's kind of all they do. So they were able to help me out a lot. And it's mostly me mounting it.

I mean, my parents are supportive. They just don't really want to be public about it, which I totally understand. Right, right. And where are you with the lawsuit? We just started. It was filed in December. So things are-

Oh, okay. So this is really new. Pretty fresh, yeah. And what are you asking for? What are the claims and what is the... Describe the suit. I mean, vaguely malpractice and just asking for damages. And I've gone through breast reconstruction surgery and had to pay out of pocket for that. And all the medical costs associated with future things like fertility or my other medical problems related to hormonal things,

I would just like some compensation for those costs. Right, and then with regards to the public impact of this, what are you hoping for? I am hoping for change. I don't want to demand anything. I'm not a lawmaker or a doctor, so I can't make any broad assertions, but I definitely think the standard of care

where it's at right now is pretty abysmal. What would you like to see be the case? I would like to see people working on helping people rather than pushing as many things as quickly as possible and getting people to agree to as many things quickly as possible because that's definitely what seems to be the trend, not actually helping kids and investigating what's going on with these kids.

It's more the fight to prescribe them as many things. Well, the standard of care before all of this became politicized was some of this was established in Alberta at CAMH and the man who established it, he was just a clinician. He had his career destroyed. He had been working with kids with gender dysphoria for a very long period of time, and his conclusion was, the overarching condition is depression and anxiety. Some of that's focused on bodily concerns. The basic standard of care should be focused on the depression and anxiety, and you should leave well enough alone, at least till the age of 18, where most people... Exactly.

It reconciles, just like puberty reconciles for most people. Right, and his career was destroyed for that once it became politicized. That's crazy. Right, and he was... He launched a lawsuit against the people who destroyed his career and was eventually vindicated, but it took like, I don't know how many years, a very long period of time. against the people who destroyed his career and was eventually vindicated, but you know, it took like, I don't know how many years, a very long period of time, right? So that was a perfectly sane and professionally appropriate standard of care, and it's based

on the principle of first do no harm, right? Which is a good rule of thumb, right? Okay, so what are you doing with your life at the moment apart from the lawsuit? Right now I'm just in college and trying to get... Are you at UCLA? Yes. Hmm. So what's that been like now that you have a certain degree of notoriety and UCLA

is quite a politicized campus? It's been a little difficult. I won't lie. I've definitely been noticed a bit more times than I'd like. And... Noticed how? People have asked me about things and brought up very sort of... A lot of the information that I'm talking about publicly is very, very personal and not something I really just want to like talk about in everyday conversations. So having people like very kind of hostilely confront me

and tell me that I'm a bad person for talking about my experiences or things like that. How often does that happen? Thankfully, infrequently, but it's happened a couple times. Yeah, well, it doesn't have to happen that often before it's like, you don't have to be accosted hostilely by strangers very often for it actually to be a concern. Right. Is it possible for you to continue at UCLA under those conditions?

I hope so. I think so. So far, most people close to me have been awesome and really supportive, and most people that know me are nice. Right. So you have a social support network. Yeah. Okay. So maybe we'll close this part then with the discussion. You went through dialectical behavior therapy and with some marked degree of success on relatively trying conditions, so that's quite surprising. And maybe that's a testament to your persistence and honesty and also to the skill of your therapist. that would be my guess. And now your attitude towards your sex has changed. Okay. You said partly that was because you, what exactly?

You understood what happened when you were six? How did you reconcile yourself to that? I started to contextualize it and truly understand it as abuse and something that I shouldn't just avoid, which is how I had seen it for a very long time. And once I started to reconcile with that, I was actually able to confront the realities. Right, so that takes some of the guilt off you. Right. Well, this other kid was 10?

Yeah. Right, so it wasn't like He was particularly well supervised. No. Ten is also not very old. Exactly. Right, so there's a story there too. Yeah. So, you know, from the perspective of a six-year-old, a ten-year-old might as well be an adult.

Yeah. But from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old, a six-year-old and a ten-year-old are both kids. Yeah. So, okay, so you could contextualize it more effectively. Right. And that removed some of the guilt and shame from you. Yeah. So, okay, so you could contextualize it more effectively. Right. And that removed some of the guilt, shame from you. Right.

Or all of it? Most of it, and I was also able to sort of understand, obviously I can never understand why exactly, but you also mentioned like with another kid, there's also something happening on that end, and I was able to fully sort of understand that it wasn't something I did, and there's nothing wrong with me.

Yeah, well who knows what the history of that was. It's probably something awful as well. Well, that would be at least something you would investigate if you're trying to figure it out because something happened. And then you'd also wonder, well, how was it situationally that this could occur repeatedly in secrecy? Yeah. Right, because that's part of the situational determinants.

Okay, but you worked through that. Okay. And then what? That alleviated some of your concern about being female as well? Yeah. I mean, to me, once I started sort of thinking about what had happened to me and I started thinking about why I was doing the things that I was doing. Why was I really trying to hide my chest?

Why was I trying to conceal my sex? And it was really just because I was suffering from really, really concealed PTSD that I had just thought wasn't happening, but I was just in constant fear, essentially. Right, right. And so, okay, so why do you think that fear and PTSD reconciled, resolved? Yeah, I mean, I think once I was able to notice it, I was able to think about other ways to

sort of calm that instead of just letting it rule my life. And that's what I was doing by living as a different sex. Right, right. So once you identified it and walked through it, reconfigured it, so that took out the shame and the guilt, but also some of the fear of being female. Okay, now you said at the same time you were also starting to think about, say, having kids. So you were starting to contemplate in the future, well, the preeminent advantage of

being female, which obviously is to have kids and that, and that what? That became attractive. Yeah. I started thinking about wanting to have kids and how much satisfaction that would bring me and it made me really sad that I might have taken that opportunity away from myself at such a young age. Right. So now you could see, I see. So once you shed the guilt and the fear and the shame, you could see opportunity. Yeah.

Right, right. Well, that's a good definition of reconciliation. So as far as you're concerned now, how would you characterize your identity now? I'm female and I'm happy to be female. I don't really try and think about my identity because I think spending so long attributing everything in my life to something wrong with my identity or my physical being was what was driving a lot of my unhealthy behaviors. Okay.

All right. Well, I think, is there anything else that you want to bring up that we haven't covered? Is there anything you want to tell the audience, let's say, before we bring this to a close? Not specifically. Nothing beyond the fact that I don't really have a political agenda. I'm not doing this for… I've already been accused of doing this for attention, and that's the last of my wants. I just want to spread awareness about this, and I can't sit by and let people say that

this doesn't happen when this is something that has truly ruptured my life. Okay, so if you were going to, and you are in fact doing this, what words do you have to say to someone who's 11, who's female, who's confused? So you can address people like that. Right now, you've been through the mill, let's say. So what do you say to someone who's, to you, when you're 11? What do you say? I would say that there is nothing physically wrong with you.

And anything that you think is physically wrong with you is because something external is making you feel like there's something wrong with you. That there is nothing you need to fix about your body. You're fine. You're perfect just the way you are. Anything that's making you feel differently is totally external. Mm-hmm. And so it should be dealt with in that manner.

Right. Right. So don't look to your body first. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's very much akin to the principle of minimal necessary intervention, right? Don't use surgery where discussion would suffice, for example. Or more than suffice, in your situation, it not only suffice but was curative. Right. And so that should have been attempted first, obviously.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So your depression and anxiety should have been dealt with. You know, I talked to Chloe Cole, and I structured the conversation similarly, at least insofar as delving into the the particulars of your diagnosis. There's no excuse for not telling you that that dysphoric state is common, that it's part of what young women experience when they go through puberty, that exacerbation of depression and anxiety that can be severe, that desire to hide, and that elevated sense of concern about bodily appearance. Obviously you're going to be concerned about bodily appearance when all sorts of strange things are happening.

They indicate a new status and vulnerability that you have no real idea how to deal with and you're mutable. How, so it's inexcusable that you weren't told that. Now, I would say with regards to the abuse, that's more complex, right? Because you didn't tell them. And then that begs the question of whether, you know, that was just abject refusal on your part or whether some additional time and a bit more curiosity, a little less

jumping to conclusions. Well, let's end with that. How much questioning do you think it would have taken when you were 12 to find out from you that something had happened to you when you were little? Right. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, so I obviously can't put myself in their shoes. But in my opinion, I don't think it would have taken much because I had had a lot of strange ideas about what it meant to be female or what it meant to be male or sexuality or things like that. And it had even been pointed out by my peers

that my knowledge of sexuality was a bit inappropriate. And I think if they had just poked a little bit about some of the experiences that I had had or my opinions, or just even asked if I had had any inappropriate experiences with other kids, I think I would have been able to say something. Okay, well, I think we'll leave it at that. I think what we'll do for everybody watching and listening, I think what we'll do on the

Daily Warrior side is delve a little bit more into issues of identity, right? Because one of the subtexts in this conversation was, and this is a consequence of the reign of a particular sort of ideology, is that identity is best conceptualized, let's say, in gendered or even sexual terms. And that's by no means obvious. And there's a fair bit of reason also to assume that that in itself is harmful. So one of the things that personality and clinical psychologists know for example is that narrow self-concern and misery are identical statistically and conceptually. Any ideology that enhances

narrow self-consciousness necessarily produces negative emotion. So we'll talk about identity on the daily wear side, and that gives us an additional half an hour for this conversation. For those of you that are inclined to join us there. Clementine, thank you very much for coming to talk about this. And you do it in a remarkably calm and composed manner, given the severity of the situation. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

So, yeah. Thanks everybody. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks everybody.