Gender affirming catastrophe? House probes NIH for lax oversight, lawsuit alleges shoddy evaluation

The National Institutes of Health faces scrutiny from congressional Republicans about oversight of its research grants after a recipient revealed she declined to publish her findings on so-called gender affirming care for minors in the U.S. because it might be "weaponized," creating a false medical consensus on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions for gender-confused youth.

Seven hours away on the Acela Corridor, a lawsuit against a Harvard Medical School-affiliated provider of gender affirming care for youth threatens to further erode trust in an American medical establishment that has long told parents their children are a suicide risk without immediate gender affirmation.

The House Oversight Committee opened an investigation of NIH on Monday after a federally funded researcher admitted she sat on undesirable results for nine years from a two-year study of puberty blockers' effects on adolescents' mental health, for political reasons.

The researcher, Children's Hospital Los Angeles pediatrician Johanna Olson-Kennedy, told The New York Times her team's failure to find mental health improvements, as expected, could be "weaponized" against the treatment, which is difficult and sometimes impossible to reverse. 

She defended the findings by saying the 95 studied adolescents were "in really good shape when they come in," contradicting her own description of the group years earlier.

"NIH has a duty to conduct oversight of its extramural research grants and ensure that its funded research exemplifies its purported principles of scientific integrity," Healthcare Subcommittee Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., told NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, asking for reams of documents related to NIH's broader $9.7 million "Trans Youth Care" project.

The agency didn't answer queries for its response to McClain nor about why it doesn't require funding recipients to publish their full results.

"In addition to gender dysphoria, 51 percent of the TYC cohort reported elevated depression symptoms and 57 percent reported clinically significant anxiety," McClain told Bertagnolli. "Two-thirds of the children reported suicidal ideations and one fourth of those with suicidal ideations reported at least one past suicide attempt."

Olson-Kennedy’s revisionist description of the cohort and "refusal to publish taxpayer-funded research because they contradict her pre-existing biases and could be cited by critics of 'gender affirming' medical interventions is an irrefutable example of politicization of scientific research to further an ideological agenda," McClain wrote.

She asked for all grant applications and "summary statements" since Aug. 1, 2015, on TYC, which includes the mental-heath study, including any that mention "medical ethics."

McClain also sought all progress reports on the project, formally named "The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth," unpublished project data in its "possession, custody, or control" and all documents and communications involving the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH and Department of Health and Human Services.

The highest-ranking transgender person in the federal government, HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, covertly convinced the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to drop  its planned age minimums of 14-17 for various hormonal and surgical procedures, including castration and mastectomy, in its 2022 guidance known as Standards of Care 8.

The American Academy of Pediatrics also threatened to oppose SOC 8, globally relied upon by gender clinics, healthcare providers and insurers, if WPATH didn't remove age minimums.

Olson-Kennedy "said a very quietly held truth very out loud: The American scientific enterprise has become political activism, and no longer a source of objective truth-seeking," J. Scott Turner, National Association of Scholars director of science programs, told Just the News.

Regardless of funding, a scientist "has a duty to subject her results to her colleagues’ critical scrutiny" or else science has no "benefit to society," he wrote in an email. Government-funded researchers have an "additional civic duty" to publicly share findings with taxpayers.

While NIH doesn't require recipients to publish, they are "expected to provide annual reports" to the agency for private review, he said. "If a previously supported project produced few or no publishable results, this would weigh against future grant application."

But because "the community of scientists supported by the NIH is pretty incestuous, especially if there are large financial or political interests at stake," and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is an avid supporter of gender affirming care, Olson-Kennedy's actions are less surprising than her public defense of it, Turner said – what he called “policy-based evidence making."

SOC 8's lead author on prepubescent children, Boston College psychologist Amy Tishelman, told a WPATH conference two years ago the drafting committee flip-flopped on age minimums to account for "legal and insurance contexts" such as malpractice lawsuits based on "proscriptive standards" of care and insurers rejecting coverage for procedures deemed "not necessary."

She subjected youth treatment standards to further scrutiny through Tishelman's age- and gender-based discrimination and retaliation lawsuit in Suffolk County Superior Court against Boston Children's Hospital, which hosts one of the gender clinics that rushed to hide promotions for surgical and hormonal procedures for adolescents after critics exposed them.

Having suffered a hoax bomb threat after its promos were exposed, it convinced the judge to seal allegations in Tishelman's exhibits that "will add fuel to an already highly charged public debate … and could cause serious, irreversible harm" to the hospital and practitioners, investigative journalist Ben Ryan reported from the trial for the New York Sun.

The hospital says it fired Tishelman in 2021 for violating federal privacy laws by viewing records for hundreds of patients she wasn't treating. It had accused her of "chronic delinquency in turning in her patient reports" from the gender clinic, and the hospital said she wanted to find other psychologists who were also late but treated differently.

Her allegations echo those of whistleblower Jamie Reed, some of which Washington University's pediatric gender clinic confirmed while disputing her overall narrative. Boston Children's treated about 300 "sex change" patients over five years, according to Do No Harm's new database of insurance claims and gender-dysphoria diagnoses.

Tishelman testified in the suit Thursday that administrators gave her 20 hours "and sometimes longer" to evaluate patients at its pioneering gender clinic, including writing a lengthy report, when she joined as director of clinical research in 2013.

It was used to talk to the child and family, "conduct scoring of major mental-health and neurodivergence markers," evaluate suicidality and "determine the family’s concerns about infertility," and sometimes "confer with the patient’s outside therapist or school counselor."

The hospital cut that evaluation time in half within a few years, then again in early 2018 to what Tishelman called a "reckless" two hours for assessment and a half-hour to write the report, which she argued reduced the complex process to "taking an aspirin." One of the ditched screenings was for autism, which is often associated with gender dysphoria.

The hospital banned Tishelman from seeing patients in 2019, compromising her research on gender-confused kids, and fired her two years later, which put the kibosh on a planned database of all the gender clinic's patients that would let her track them into adulthood, she said. Now "we don’t know whatever happened to them and how they’re doing."

The hospital, which uses a Harvard email address, told Just the News in an uncredited statement it "cannot comment on ongoing litigation."

Turner told Just the News the lawsuit reminded him of "the 1920s mania to sterilize the feeble-minded, which continued well into the 1960[s]," fueled by eugenics. 

"Then, candidates for sterilization were evaluated by crude tests of mental competence to identify 'morons' and 'imbeciles,'' and today's "rush" into gender affirming care is "disturbingly similar," he said. It's a "form of ritual child abuse."