USC physician sued over gender treatment
A professor of clinical pediatrics has been sued by a patient who underwent a double mastectomy at age 14.
We bring you an important update on a subject we covered in a previous newsletter. In our October 29th newsletter, we detailed how Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a professor of clinical pediatrics at USC and director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (academically affiliated with USC), effectively silenced a tax-payer funded study on the efficacy of puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria (Read the full coverage in the New York Times.)
Now, a former patient is suing Olson-Kennedy for treatment they received as a teenager. Clementine, a 20-year-old UCLA student, received puberty blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14, all under Olson-Kennedy’s care, per The Economist.
We’re hoping the university is taking this seriously. It’s likely to be one of many lawsuits hitting her center in the coming years, given that it’s one of the largest in the country for this sort of disastrous “care.”
There’s actually a real opportunity here for USC to course correct and be on the forefront of better approaches to treating children and teens with gender dysphoria. May we suggest that the USC administration all attend our January conference on censorship in the sciences, to learn how censorship has distorted our understanding of “trans kids” and how to treat them?
Jesse Singal (author of the aforementioned The Economist article) will be giving a talk entitled How “Soft” Censorship in Media and Academia Helped Make the U.S.A. Youth-Gender-Medicine-Outlier.
Tickets are still available for this event, and additional speakers and events include:
Pseudo-Defenses of Free Speech on Campus and How They Undermine Open Inquiry Speaker: Mike Veber
Censorship and Self-Censorship by the Numbers
Nate Honeycutt: Prevalence of Self-Censorship Among University Faculty.
Wayne Stargardt: Silencing Science at MIT
April Bleske-Rechek: Censorship and Perceptions of Harm
From Worriers to Warriors: The Rise of Women in Science and Society Speaker: Cory Clark
Your Speech Is Freer Than You Think: The Irrational Risk Aversion of (Most) Academic Self-Censorship Speaker: Matthew Burgess
And much more! View the whole schedule here and check out more conference details here. This conference is open to the public and we also offer a student rate.
If you’ve already bought your ticket, we’re looking forward to having you. If you can’t attend in person, we’ll also be live-streaming and recording these proceedings. A Zoom link will be sent out prior to the conference via our Substack.
We’d also love if you’d forward our email to anyone you know who might be interested in attending.
Merit Based Science is Effective and Fair
Last newsletter, we shared a video of a presentation made by Heterodox Academy member Anna Krylov, USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry, at USC’s Quantitative and Computational Biology retreat. You can now read a complete transcript of her talk:
In Memoriam: Alex Small
We were saddened to learn of the passing of Alex Small, a physicist at Cal Poly Pomona, USC alumnus, Heterodox Academy member and early subscriber to our newsletter. Small received a bachelor’s degree in physics, with a minor in economics, from USC before going on to complete his PhD in physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He joined the faculty of Cal Poly Pomona in 2007, where he taught and conducted research until his passing. He recently receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Optical Society of Southern California, honoring his decade of work with the group. In addition to his teaching, mentorship, and research, he was a skilled writer and a founding member of the Heterodox Academy Writer’s Group.
We shared some of his thoughtful writing earlier this year: “Whom Would Jesus Cancel?” published in Inside Higher Ed. For his academic scholarship, you can read his most-cited paper here and his most recent paper here.
Interesting USC News and Research
USC Stem Cell study breaks the silence on how fish and lizards regenerate hearing
If you have suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feedback on our newsletter, or want to get more involved with Heterodox at USC please contact us at heterodox.usc@gmail.com. Fight On!
I am deeply saddened by the passing of Alex Small. I first met Alex first virtually, through the HxSTEM community. Alex led an important effort -- he and his collaborators set out to publish a critique of a loony physics education paper titled 'Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study' published in Physical Review – Physics Education Research journal. They experienced what can be described as not-so-soft censorship -- the journal simply refused to publish their well-argued commentary with ridiculous pretexts. But Alex and his co-authors persisted and published the comment and the story of their interactions with the journal in the European Review:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/resistance-to-critiques-in-the-academic-literature-an-example-from-physics-education-research/5EB221741339AFE52F314DF27064F01D
We met in person later when Alex came to a USC alumni event and had delightful discussions about physics, academia, and life.
It is incredibly sad to lose such a wonderful human being... Rest in peace...