Clementine Breen Sues Famous Gender Doctor, after Rushed Medical Transition
At 12, one 28-minute consult gave me puberty blockers. By 14 I’d had a mastectomy. The doctors ignored my sexual abuse and psychosis. Now I’m 20, detransitioned, and suing for the lost years they can’t give back.
Overview
Clementine Breen, now 20, was fast-tracked through medical transition by Dr. Joanna Olson-Kennedy after a single 28-minute visit at age 12. Puberty blockers, testosterone, and a double mastectomy followed within two years, despite documented sexual abuse and escalating psychosis. After trauma-focused therapy, she detransitioned, sued the doctor, and is recovering her health and identity.
Full Video Summary
Clementine Breen, now 20, began her medical transition at age 12 under the care of Dr. Joanna Olson-Kennedy, a leading Los Angeles gender clinician who had received a $6 million federal grant to study puberty blockers. After a single 28-minute consultation, Olson-Kennedy diagnosed gender dysphoria and prescribed puberty blockers, telling the family that delaying treatment would worsen Clementine’s depression. Within a year she was started on injectable testosterone, and at 14—while still in eighth grade—she underwent a double mastectomy. The entire sequence, from first clinic visit to irreversible surgery, unfolded in roughly two years. During this period the only therapeutic input came from Susan Landon, a therapist recommended by Olson-Kennedy, whose sessions Clementine describes as “surface-level” chats about pronouns and clothing rather than exploration of the sexual abuse she had suffered in first grade or the chronic domestic violence she witnessed at home because of her severely autistic, sometimes violent older brother. Almost immediately after surgery Clementine’s mental health collapsed. She developed severe insomnia, paranoid delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations, and what she and later psychiatrists labeled testosterone-induced psychosis. She began self-harming and attempted suicide, yet no clinician—not Olson-Kennedy, Landon, or the outside psychiatrist who managed her antipsychotics—ever suggested stopping testosterone. Instead, when she found the injections unbearable, the clinic switched her to testosterone gel so she could “stay on T” without the needles that triggered her self-injury. At 17, Olson-Kennedy raised the prospect of a hysterectomy, an event Clementine identifies as the first moment she felt “this is too far.” Throughout, her documented complaints of psychosis, cutting, and school refusal were minimized in clinic notes as “anxiety,” and her family’s repeated warnings that major medical decisions should wait until the home trauma was addressed were dismissed as irrelevant. Detransition began only after she finally engaged in trauma-focused DBT and imaginal exposure therapy, which helped her recognize that her discomfort with femininity was rooted in PTSD, not gender dysphoria. When she tapered off testosterone in 2024, the insomnia, rage, and dissociation lifted; she began to experience natural estrogen-driven emotions and, for the first time, felt “clear-headed.” After months of reflection she told her parents and friends that she was a woman, then pursued breast reconstruction—an experience she describes as immediately healing, unlike the mastectomy she once slept through “like a baby.” Clementine has since filed suit against Olson-Kennedy, alleging negligent fast-tracking of irreversible medical interventions and systematic disregard of her trauma history and severe psychiatric deterioration.