Video footage shows a medical professional downplaying the significance of young girls making the “life altering” decision to get “chest surgery.”
“Actually, people make life altering decisions in adolescence all the time, and honestly most of them are good, it’s just the bad ones that we talk about,” said Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an associate professor at the University of Southern California.
“So what we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasonable, logical decision. And here’s the thing about chest surgery. If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them,” Olson-Kennedy said.
The video was first posted by conservative commentator Matt Walsh, who works for the Daily Wire. (RELATED: Arkansas Legislature Defies Governor, Becomes First State To Ban Trans Surgeries For Minors)
The footage was reportedly first captured at a California transgender medical conference “Professional Symposium” in July 2018. Walsh told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the video was mentioned in Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” a book which examines spikes in transgenderism among teenaged girls who formerly displayed feminine traits and tendencies.
Watch this. A prominent “trans-affirming” doctor says it’s okay to chop the breasts off of a teen girl because kids “most of the time make good decisions” and a girl can always get new breasts later if she wants. These quacks are destroying our children. This is pure evil. pic.twitter.com/2sF7YPa5b5
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 24, 2021
Olson-Kennedy, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF, has co-authored a number of studies on transgender surgeries and procedures for youth, including a study on “chest reconstruction” for minors and young adults.
The 2018 study found that “chest dysphoria was high among presurgical transmasculine youth, and surgical intervention positively affected both minors and young adults.” Olson-Kennedy pushed for “professional guidelines and clinical practice” to “consider patients for chest surgery based on individual need rather than chronologic age.”
The study reported “near zero” regret for the 136 women and girls who completed the study. It is unclear how much time had passed between the chest surgeries and the responses to the study, which was limited to those between 13 and 25 years old.
Walsh posted the video a day after the publication of a 60 Minutes segment in which multiple men and women who have detransitioned described how easy it was for them to get transgender surgeries and hormones. CBS News host Lesley Stahl interviewed multiple medical experts and former or current transgender people who expressed fear that transgender surgeries and hormone treatments, often irreversible, are too easily attainable.
“I can’t believe that I transitioned and detransitioned, including hormones and surgery, in the course of, like, less than one year,” one young woman who has detransitioned, Grace Lidinsky-Smith, said in the segment. “It’s completely crazy.”
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