Benjamin Ryan
@benryanwriter • 48,681 subscribers
Independent investigative journalist Contact via Signal: benryan.23 Subscribe: https://t.co/dQRHZHqWHn
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Easily the finest opening credits of a film in the history of cinema:
Benjamin Ryan1,230,074 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
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OHSU Performed Vaginoplasties On 17 Year Olds Oregon Health & Science University urologist Dr. Geolani Dy said that for “a lot” of the hospital’s young patients, the timing of a vaginoplasty (a surgery that includes castration) “will fall around the seventeen-, eighteen-year-old age range.” Dr. Dy said this during a presentation at the 2021 conference of the US offshoot of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, USPATH. See the main post in the thread for my article in Compact and my companion post with dozens of clips like this one.
Benjamin Ryan44,090 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Dr. Natasha Johnson, a pediatrician at McMaster University, has become president of the Canadian Paediatric Society. Dr. Johnson said at a 2022 WPATH conference that "parents' feelings" about their child's medicalized gender transition "should not be prioritized over the youth’s experience.” In other words, she argued for discounting parental objections to prescribing their children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria. Dr. Johnson was instrumental in stirring up the protests against the recent systematic reviews of pediatric gender medicine out of Dr. Gordon Guyatt's lab. These protests ultimately led Dr. Guyatt and some of his colleagues to denounce their funder, the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine SEGM, and seek to pull their names off of pending review papers, putting them in limbo. More on the WPATH videos here: More on the McMaster protests here:
Benjamin Ryan24,666 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
The Boston conference panel featuring four skeptics of pediatric gender medicine went off this morning with minimal disruptions. I obtained video and audio of the surrounding protests, one of the disruptions from a WPATH leader, and the moderator, Dr. Rauch, introducing the panel. I've dropped all of that into an update to this Substack I published on Friday if you want to take a look: Otherwise, the videos are below. They feature: *Protests outside the conference hall, including a marching band. *Kale Edmiston, a neuroscientist by training and a coauthor of one of the chapters of WPATH’s Standards of Care, disrupting the panel and interfacing with the panelists. *A protester being dragged away.
Benjamin Ryan25,893 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
NEWS: Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the controversial leading figure in the pediatric gender medicine field, is no longer employed by Children's Hospital Los Angeles. CHLA shuttered the pediatric gender clinic she ran in July in the face of threats from the Trump administration of withholding Medicaid payments to hospitals that provided gender-transition interventions to those under age 19. An email sent to Dr. Olson-Kennedy's email account with CHLA prompts an auto reply that reads: "CHLA has closed the Center for Transyouth Health and Development as of July 22, 2025. I am no longer at CHLA." CHLA had indicated that it would seek to reassign staffers impacted by the closing of the gender clinic. A lightening rod in this field, Dr. Olson-Kennedy is known for her steadfast opposition to psychosocial assessments of minors before they are put on gender-transition drugs. She is particularly notorious for having said at a training she was providing to other care providers, in reference to people who regret having undergone a double mastectomy for a gender transition: “What we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned, logical decision. And here’s the other thing about chest surgery: If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.” In December, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was sued by a detransitioner to whom she prescribed puberty blockers on her first visit at age 12, without conducting a psychosocial assessment. She then put the girl on testosterone at age 13 and then cleared her for a mastectomy at age 14.
Benjamin Ryan61,794 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
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DHS The video of the ICE shooting taken from the opposite angle, by the woman in red has emerged:
Benjamin Ryan40,890 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Kellan Baker counseled against saying “gender-affirming care.” Messaging research indicated that when people hear it, he said, “they think ‘trans kids in the driver’s seat.’” But he said this was an accurate assessment. “I think we all support trans kids in the driver’s seat because it’s their bodies, it’s their lives,” he said. “But when you think about folks who don’t know trans people, they are very scared by the idea that young people are making irreversible decisions and that no one else has any oversight over those decisions.” To read my article in Compact about the 100s of videos I obtained from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its US offshoot, USPATH: I will be publishing the most notable conference videos on my Subsack:
Benjamin Ryan25,823 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
On CBS News, I reported on the $2M judgment in the 1st detransitioner civil suit to go to trial. I recalled the mother saying her daughter’s psychologist browbeat her into consenting to a gender-transition mastectomy for the 16 year old. But then the president-elect of WPATH testified that such surgeries, in fact, are not a form of suicide prevention, full stop.
Benjamin Ryan31,584 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
All of this “cooking is way too complicated and expensive for anyone to possibly make sense of, so we’d better just DoorDash” content is out. of. control. 🦞Just watch while I show you how to make Julia Child’s lobster thermidor for six. “What, like it’s hard?”
Benjamin Ryan13,383 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
“Any form of ageism is unethical,” Simona Giordano, a bioethicist at the Univ of Manchester and WPATH ethics committee member, said in 2022 regarding providing gender-transition interventions to minors. “Refusing to treat someone because they are too young is as unjust as refusing to treat someone because they are too old. Decisions shouldn’t be based on age, but on capacity to benefit from treatment.” To read my article in Compact about the 100s of videos I obtained from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its US offshoot, USPATH, scroll up.
Benjamin Ryan19,205 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
"Insidious": The ACLU's Chase Strangio Slams The New York Times In Leaked Audio I report 🧵⬇️⬇️: In some of his first comments since U.S. v Skrmetti came down, Mr. Strangio never acknowledged or responded to the sharp critiques in a recent Times investigation of his own rhetoric and actions.
Benjamin Ryan50,656 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Johanna Olson-Kennedy: “I think that a lot of this conversation...gets talked about through a lens of ‘How can we make sure people are really trans,’ right? And ‘They’re not going to regret their decision later?’” But “that’s actually not the discussion that I’m interested in participating in," she said. "I’m interested in discussing and having a conversation about giving the very best possible care to trans young people—the care that they need and deserve.” To read my article in Compact about the 100s of videos I obtained from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its US offshoot, USPATH: I will be publishing the most notable conference videos on my Subsack:
Benjamin Ryan18,866 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Internet-culture reporter Taylor Lorenz insists the advent of smartphone-based social media did not cause the soaring rates of youth mental illness post 2012. She points instead to structural economic and political factors, including the Great Recession and opioid addiction in parents. Taylor Lorenz, who has made evident through her recent statements and actions that she is an aspiring influencer, insists Jonathan Haidt has stirred a moral panic over smartphones. She previously insisted in an unpaid promo she posted and later deleted for The Bark Phone that smartphones are good for kids because they provide them a way to express themselves.
Benjamin Ryan23,747 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
LEAKED: Secret American Psychiatric Association Speech On Pediatric Gender Medicine On Monday, the APA held a session, “The Treatment of Gender Dysphoric Youth: Historical, Clinical and Political Perspectives," that was closed to journalists and the public and at which recordings were prohibited. But LGB Courage Coalition livestreamed it. Here is the talk by Dr. Scott Leibowitz, a leading pediatric gender psychiatrist. It is remarkably nuanced and I think everyone could learn a lot from it. I also published his slides, which I obtained, in my newsletter. See the link in the thread.
Benjamin Ryan37,023 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
LEAKED: Trans-Care Training Videos By Beleaguered Top Gender-Clinic Doctor, Part 1 I have obtained 12 hours of videos of top pediatric-gender-clinic physician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues, including her husband, providing training to mental-health providers on how to treat minors who have gender dysphoria or otherwise identify as transgender or nonbinary. This is the first of 12 installments I will post during the coming weeks of these videos. Subscribe to my newsletter (link in bio) to receive all of them as I publish them. A 19-year veteran of the pediatric gender medicine field and one of its leading physician-researchers and advocates, Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the medical director of the gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. According to figures she provided during this particular video, annual referrals to her clinic surged from just 25 in 2010 to 436 in 2022—following a similar pattern seen in clinics throughout the Western world. The past six months have been challenging for Dr. Olson-Kennedy, to say the least. Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health grant for a long-running research project concerning pediatric gender-transition treatment, one that has received over $10 million to date. In October, The New York Times reported that she has withheld null findings from a study of puberty blockers funded by this grant, doing so for political reasons. The grant is now the subject of a probe by congressional Republicans. In November, however, she asserted in a sworn deposition in a civil case that the Times had mischaracterized her words. In December, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was sued by a former patient, Clementine Breen, who reported that the gender doctor prescribed her puberty blockers at age 12—on her first appointment, without a psychological assessment—and testosterone at age 13, and then referred her to receive a double mastectomy at age 14. Ms. Breen, now 20, has since detransitioned, reverting to presenting and identifying as a woman. The Trump administration has unleashed an onslaught against the field of pediatric gender medicine, seeking to wipe it off the map. In recent weeks, the NIH has been canceling research grants related to transgender people, including those conducted with animal models. There is currently a preliminary injunction in place to block the president’s executive order that would freeze federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-transition interventions to those under age 19. Prior to the injunction, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s clinic had “paused” new cross-sex hormone treatments for youth, only to lift the pause a couple of weeks later. It remains unclear whether the grant for which Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the top investigator has been canceled. But it is no longer listed on the NIH site where active grants are described. I reached out to Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her co-principal investigators on the grant to ask about its status. I did not hear back. Prior to the October Times article, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was perhaps best known by the general public for a previous leaked video in which she was giving a training in 2018 to mental health care providers on how to write referral letters for minors seeking gender-transition surgeries. In the video, she expresses exasperation with what she sees as hand wringing over whether natal girls will later regret having their breast removed during adolescence. (At least 1,000 such surgeries have been conducted annually in recent years.) She says: “What we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasonable, logical decision. And here’s the other thing about chest surgery. If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them!” Ms. Breen recently reported that she was undergoing reconstructive surgery to provide herself with new breasts. However, it is very unlikely she will ever be able to breastfeed should she have children. Dr. Olson-Kennedy is also newly the president of USPATH, the U.S. branch of the medical-activist group the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH, which despite is name is largely a U.S.-based organization, has been besieged by damaging publicity over the past year, in particular after internal documents subpoenaed by Alabama’s attorney general revealed that its leadership was aware that the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine was weak and sought to paper over this fact. 12 hours of leaked Olson-Kennedy training videos The 12-hour training in what is known as the gender-affirming care method for minors who identify as trans or nonbinary took place in late April 2024—a few weeks after Britain published the Cass Review, which found that this medical field is based on “remarkably weak evidence.” The training was led by Dr. Olson-Kennedy; her husband, Aydin Olson-Kennedy, who has a doctorate in social work and is a transgender man; and licensed clinical social worker Darlene Tando. I obtained the videos a few months ago. The training videos are a window into not just the methods of these individuals, but their overall attitudes about gender dysphoria and transgender and nonbinary identification in children. A prevailing attitude they share is one of indignation and irritation with a medical system that demands that children betray a substantial level of distress before they are granted gender-transition medications. Overall, these three favor less gatekeeping and less pathologizing of the mental states and internal lives of the children in their care. If a gender-incongruent child arrives in their care absent any particular distress about their identification as the opposite sex, they believe that that child should be granted the opportunity to medically transition by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones if the family wishes. I have edited the videos to snip or crop out images that would identify the participants in the training, whether because of Zoom-chat questions that pop up in the right-hand corner of the screen, or moments when a matrix of the participants is visible. You can watch the video at the beginning of this Substack. Otherwise, I wrote a summary below:
Benjamin Ryan41,063 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr