DR Z PHD Interviews Aydin Olson-Kennedy.
In this essential interview for mental health professionals and transgender adults, Dr. Z speaks with Aidan Olsen-Kennedy, a licensed clinical social worker who has specialized in transgender and non-binary mental health care for 10 years. As Executive Director of the Los Angeles Gender Center, Aidan has led the organization's mission since 2015 to center trans and non-binary clinicians—shifting from predominantly cisgender providers to community-led care.
Aidan shares his personal transition experience at age 31 (now 14-15 years ago), driving 3.5 hours each direction every weekend to see a "gender specialist" who charged exploitative rates—an experience that fundamentally shaped his commitment to accessible, non-exploitative care. He explains why the LA Gender Center provides free evaluation letters for surgery, operates on sliding scale fees, and trains future clinicians through internships and associate programs.
This conversation dismantles pervasive myths about transgender experience with clinical precision. When asked if people can be "brainwashed" into thinking they're trans, Aidan delivers a paradigm-shifting response: if brainwashing exists, it's cisgender narratives doing the brainwashing—there's an abundance of cis messaging that limits gender exploration, not the reverse. He explains how the "brainwashing" concern is actually a symptom of society's persistent invalidation of trans experiences.
Key topics include: why the trauma-causation narrative has moved through different marginalized identities (from gay people to trans people) for centuries, how even if trauma did influence gender for some people and they're happier and functioning better—that's fine, the exploitation of detransition data from Dutch studies (people lost to follow-up were incorrectly categorized as detransitioners), why "rapid onset gender dysphoria" is complete nonsense with no scientific validity, and how gender dysphoria itself can be traumatic without trauma causing gender identity.
This interview reveals Aidan's philosophy that pre-transition therapy was problematic because it asked people to imagine something different without providing anything different—forcing people to tell a "trans script" to get access rather than authentic exploration. He advocates for eliminating all letter requirements for surgery, arguing they position trans people as mentally ill and unable to make decisions about their bodies, and calls for surgeons to bear more responsibility by providing post-op mental health support as standard care.
Aidan shares vulnerable truths about his transition: experiencing menopause and puberty simultaneously (no one warned him), panicking that he'd made a terrible mistake until someone told him it was normal, learning to remap emotions as gender dysphoria volume decreased, and navigating new white male privilege consciously. He discusses meeting his wife, Dr. Johanna Olsen-Kennedy (pediatrician at CHLA), at a gender conference where she sneezed on him, their five years of friendship through annual summer conferences, and parenting together with flexibility their teen's generation needs.
This conversation offers clinical expertise, personal wisdom, and urgent advocacy for why trans and non-binary people deserve to see themselves reflected in their mental health providers, why therapy can be tremendously helpful but shouldn't be mandatory, and why body autonomy means eliminating gatekeeping that treats transgender adults as incapable of informed consent about their own lives.
