Major Gender Doctor Isn't 'Interested In' Whether Minors Seeking Gender Drugs Are 'Really Trans'

The hundreds of subpoenaed conference videos from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its U.S. offshoot, USPATH, that I have obtained contain nearly a dozen that feature the biggest lightning rod in pediatric gender medicine: Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy.

Today’s Substack is my first effort to publish all the Olson-Kennedy videos. This particular video, featured in full above, contains her astonishing admission that she is not “interested in” the “conversation” about whether young patients who present to pediatric gender clinics are “really trans.”

I covered 130 of the pediatrics-related conference videos in a feature article for Compact magazine last week. I encourage you to read that. And please subscribe and support my work, as I begin the long process of publishing and providing analysis about all these videos.

This particular video features a symposium of leading figures in pediatric gender medicine, held at the USPATH conference in November 2023. The panel was moderated by Dr. Maddie Deutsch, director of University of California, San Francisco’s gender clinic, who was USPATH’s president at the time. (She would pass the torch to Dr. Olson-Kennedy.)

The panel included (from left to right in the video):

• Dr. Natalie Nokoff, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado

• Laura Kuper, a child and adolescent psychologist in Dallas

• Dr. Olson-Kennedy, a pediatrician who was then the head of the gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (which was closed in July 2025 under pressure by the Trump administration)

• Dr. Robert Garofalo, who runs the pediatric gender clinic at Lurie Children’s in Chicago (which is teetering under pressure from Trump)

• Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, a pediatric endocrinologist and the medical director at UCSF’s gender clinic

• Lisa Griffin, a clinical psychologist working with children and adolescents in Baltimore

The panelists. Dr. Olson-Kennedy holds the mic.

Dr. Deutsch emphasized that there was to be no photography or recording of the panel—part of the veil of silence that WPATH and USPATH imposed over these confabs during an increasingly secretive time for the joint organizations. WPATH fought tooth and nail to keep a federal judge from unsealing the nearly 500 conference videos that the Alabama attorney general subpoenaed, and ultimately lost that fight last year. That led me to obtain the lot of them.

The panel was comprised by members of a “quality task force” that had been established within WPATH to assess the quality of care provided by mental-health and medical professionals in the gender-medicine field. In particular, they sought to assess such providers’ adherence to WPATH’s trans-care guidelines when caring for minors. Those guidelines are known as The Standards of Care, Version 8, or SoC 8. The group, which had met every couple of months since the spring of 2023, wanted to know what the process of assessing pediatric patients seeking gender-transition interventions looks like in practice.

Here are the members of the task force:

“There may be barriers to the recommendations that we come up with and then make recommendations for training, qualifications and access to care,” Dr. Deutsch said of the task force’s efforts. “So we see this as sort of a companion document to the SoC 8.”

The panel was held a year after WPATH secretly capitulated to pressure from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Trevor Project, and a Biden health official to remove the age limits in the SoC 8, which was published in September 2022. At the 2023 conference, Dr. Deutsch, whether she knew the truth or not, effectively glossed over why the age limits were removed when addressing the subject.