The Journey Into Gender Transition
Chloe Cole represents a growing community of young people known as detransitioners who have been through the medical process of sex change procedures but have permanently chosen to go back. She underwent this process between the ages of 12 to 16, beginning with the administration of chemical castration agents to stop her natural puberty, which was quickly followed by weekly injections of high doses of testosterone to masculinize her body and make her appear and behave more like a young man. At 15 years old, she underwent surgery to permanently remove her breasts.
Cole describes herself as somewhere between being a stereotypical tomboy and a girly girl in her early childhood. Her father once told her there was a point when she wouldn't leave the house without wearing a sparkly tutu or bright colors or hearts or sparkles. But there was also a boyish streak to her, especially as she got older. After hitting puberty, she preferred having her hair short and wearing boys' clothes, and she got along better with her older brothers and the boys around her at school. She found it really difficult to fit in with her female friends.
Cole never thought of these things as character flaws. She saw them as things that made her strong, unique, and creative until she progressed through puberty and became more and more insecure. She now knows that's a very natural part of growing up for many people, but she didn't know that at the time. She wasn't close to any of her female role models, so she didn't know how to properly navigate these feelings around her changing body, her developing breasts, and the attention she was getting for that at a very early age.
Social Media and the Transgender Community
Cole started using social media when she was about 11 years old. She got her first phone just before her 12th birthday and very quickly discovered a community of people who were creative, artistic, and thought outside of the box, who shared a lot of her interests in video games and cartoons. But these weren't just superficial similarities. This was a group of young people who ostensibly seemed to be like her in every single way, including sharing these same insecurities and difficulties she had growing up. They called themselves transgender, and it was primarily young women her age who also thought that they were tomboys until one day they decided that they actually were boys.
Cole explains that she didn't believe she was a boy until that idea was put in her head. With everything she learned about this community, from the personal anecdotes to the medical literature around it that seemed to back this theory of sex and gender being separate and being on a spectrum, she thought more and more that this must be who she was. Maybe she was never her parents' daughter but actually their transgender son, and that was how her transgender identity came to be.
Understanding Social Contagion
Cole describes what happened to her as a social contagion, explaining that the transgender community and activist community will claim that being transgender is innate, that perhaps it's something people are born with. Maybe there's a physiological structure in the brain or body or a gene that makes somebody somehow the opposite sex even if they have the reproductive system of the other sex. But there is not a single inkling of a scientific basis to any of this.
When you look into the personal history of people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, it's not something that occurs in a vacuum. They often have psychological trauma that is concurrent alongside the distress, stemming from early childhood trauma, often being neglected or abused, or having a poor relationship with either one of their parental figures. Sexual trauma is a big one. There are often comorbidities of autism, other intellectual disabilities, or cluster B personality disorders.
Cole points to the demographic shift that has happened with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. It used to be primarily adult men and traumatized young boys who identified as transgender or claimed to be the opposite sex. But in recent years, particularly the past decade, there's been a huge explosion in women and primarily young women and adolescent girls who are doing this instead. Young women and teenage girls are already susceptible to social contagion, as seen with eating disorder communities, anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphia, plastic surgery, and self-harm cutting. Cole argues that transgenderism has elements of every single one of those things in different ways.
How Parents Were Manipulated
Cole's parents were not prepared for the institutional uphill battle they would be facing. They thought they could trust the doctors. Cole argues that frankly any parent, even now with the resources available, is probably not truly prepared because it feels like you're fighting against the world to save your child and protect them. Parents' instincts tell them what they knew from the very beginning when their child was born, that their child is a boy or a girl, that there's nothing wrong with them, that maybe they're struggling, but they don't have to confirm these feelings in order to make them feel better.
Cole's parents were very sensible and cautious about this. They did not want her to go through any of the medical process. They did not want to have to raise her as a boy. They knew that she wasn't transgender or their son but their beautiful daughter. But it was hard not to give in with the way that the doctors were manipulating them. Every single thing her doctors were telling them was a complete lie of manipulation and coercion. The biggest lie was that her life was on the line, that she would kill herself if she wasn't given early enough intervention, if she wasn't medicated, if she wasn't experimented upon. This wasn't told to them just once but dozens of times over the years when they were expressing their concerns and pushing back against this.
Cole doesn't blame her parents for saying yes to the procedures because she thinks that they were doing the best with everything they had at the time. She describes it as her parents being basically blackmailed with her life being the blackmail.
Violations of the Hippocratic Oath
When asked about HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s statement about violations of the Hippocratic oath with doctors, Cole explains that activists will often say her doctors just didn't go with the standards of care at the time. But for any doctor to do this to any child, and arguably to any patient regardless of how old they are, it's a violation of their very oath to do no harm, the very first tenet of medicine.
This is treatment that is not medicine but takes away some of the most beautiful parts of life to solve a temporary problem. It's a physical treatment that rips away your ability to have children, to experience normal sexual function and healthy sexual relationships. It makes you dissociate from who you really are, which causes further mental distress in most patients who go through this. No child understands what they are about to go through. Nothing about this is care.
The Turning Point
Up until she had surgery, Cole didn't think she would have any regrets. She genuinely was misled in believing that she was a young man, that this was going to fix her and make her feel more congruent with her supposed true self. Part of it was the novel aspects of all the physical changes that were happening as well as the social changes, starting to make friends as a young man and feeling like she was actually starting to fit in at school.
But the surgery was the turning point and made her realize just how destructive this was, not just to her body and to her innocence, but to her future and the path of her entire life going forward. There was a little bit of a honeymoon period with the surgery, and then she had to face reality, look down at the bandages, the wounds, and witness that every day on what was left of her breasts.
Beyond the physical recovery, Cole was also starting to mature a little bit. She was 15 going on 16 and thinking about what her life would look like beyond college, beyond what career she'd want to have. She started to learn more every day that she aspired to become a mother, that she wanted to have children of her own. She took a developmental psychology class in her junior year of high school, and that was when it really hit her how beautiful it would be to carry on her legacy and pass down her values. All her older siblings were having babies of their own at this point, and as the youngest child, she had never had the experience of babysitting or seeing the beauty of innocence from an outside perspective.
That was the single biggest reason why she detransitioned, because she realized that this might take away her ability to have children. She doesn't even know about the future of her reproductive health or the possibility that she'll be able to have any still to this day. But it was her burgeoning maternal instincts and realizing that some of the single biggest parts of her identity as an adult could be taken away if she didn't stop then.
Life After Detransition
Cole took less than a year after surgery to realize that every single part of this was a mistake, that this never should have happened to her, that as a child she deserved better. She also wanted to advocate for other children who were in her situation because she knew that there were other kids out there. She had seen the other kids who were in the hospital system, some of which had already had surgery or were about to receive these procedures. Soon her suspicions were confirmed that she wasn't alone, that there were thousands and now an ever-growing group of people who were in her exact situation, many of them also minors.
Cole has dedicated the last four years of her life to ensuring that what happened to her is never going to happen to any other child in America and hopefully throughout the globe. She is now 21 years old and represents a community of young people who have been through the medical process of sex change procedures but have permanently chosen to go back. This can be either because of regret, physical or psychological damages as a result of these procedures, or simply accepting the fact that they cannot change, that nothing they will ever do will ever make them the opposite sex, but there's nothing wrong with that.
Treatment by the Transgender Community
The moment that Cole detransitioned, she was treated as human garbage by the transgender community, even subhuman. They immediately turned their backs on her and were quick to blame her. They told her this was all her fault, not to put this on them, that she was the one who said yes, the one who wanted this. She was a complete idiot for not knowing that she wasn't truly transgender, so she shouldn't come crying to them. They told her she should shut up about this because she might scare somebody out of getting the care that they really need. She was a waste of resources, a waste of the love and support of her family. She didn't deserve the support of her doctors or any of this. They told her to stay quiet and stop being a problem.
People said even worse things. There were people who were trying to compel her to retransition, people who were trying to tell her to kill myself even just for the fact that she was going against the dogma. Cole stayed low for a little bit and apologized to the same people who were abusing her because she was a freshly traumatized 16-year-old girl. She had been bullied in school before, but nobody had ever treated her this horribly over such a painful part of her life.
After a while of being painfully isolated, she started to really think that the way they were treating her was not deserved. She was speaking to nothing but her experience, to the way that she felt, and to reality. She decided she was going to speak up regardless of whether they wanted her to or not. She knew that there had to be other detransitioners out there, and very quickly she learned that they were in the thousands. She's sure that it's doubled, tripled, quadrupled over the years. We are never going to know the real numbers, but she's grateful that she chose to speak up and that God has given her the strength in order to do so.
Some of the harassment and hatred she has faced over the years has gotten worse. She's been doxxed and has had people assaulting her, chasing after her in government buildings, who have tried to hurt her and wished death upon her. But she's also received an infinite amount more love. She's not chasing validation and doesn't care how people feel about this. She just wants something to get done. That's why she's in this.
HHS Secretary Kennedy's Statement
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke out against what he called sex-rejecting procedures for gender dysphoria for minors and announced new rules that would restrict such treatment. Kennedy stated that doctors across the country now provide needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic oath by endangering the very lives that they are sworn to safeguard.
The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children who suffer from gender dysphoria. They betrayed the estimated 300,000 American youth ages 13 to 17 conditioned to believe that sex can be changed. They betrayed their Hippocratic oath to do no harm. So-called gender-affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. This is not medicine. It is malpractice.
Cole deeply appreciates Kennedy's statement, particularly that he calls it not gender-affirming care but sex-rejecting procedures, because this treatment is not affirming anything but these children's misgivings about who they really are, their confusion, their normal adolescent discomfort that frankly everybody goes through and children who are more sensitive are more prone to. It's rejecting the very way that God beautifully created them in their mother's womb. Cole loves how he lays out how destructive this is and how he says this is not medicine but malpractice. This is what detransitioners, what the children who have been harmed and regret this, the young people who have been thrown out by this industry, and their families who have been torn apart have been waiting to hear for years. To finally hear their concerns being echoed by the federal government is incredibly vindicating.
The New HHS Rules
The new HHS rules contain several different measures. The primary one is going to reinforce Trump's executive order from January to protect children from surgical and chemical mutilation. That primarily targets Medicare and Medicaid funding in hospitals that do these procedures on children under the age of 19. They're going to create different rules that hospitals have to abide by, otherwise they're going to lose their Medicare and Medicaid services, which almost every single hospital in the United States uses. That would be a huge blow to them. It wouldn't make sense for them to continue doing these procedures on children if that were to happen to them.
They're also going to target the manufacturers of breast binders. Breast binders are medical devices that look like a tank top but are made out of compression material. They basically work by squishing the breasts into the body, which is associated with different health issues like asthma or issues with breathing or the concaving of the rib cage. This is more prominent in people who are already developing or who have larger breasts. There are so many more complications that Cole wouldn't even be able to list.
They're also going to roll back the Biden administration's decision to consider gender dysphoria to be a disability and so require care for it, which care for them means these mutilative and castrating procedures. Cole argues that gender dysphoria itself is not a disability, but these procedures lead to further health complications and in some patients even lead to them becoming disabled. She has friends who have mobility issues, who have to use walkers and canes when they're in their 20s because they've lost function in their joints and in their muscles. Some of them have to deal with muscular atrophy, or even in the males, multiple sclerosis is a known complication. These are complications that are a result of these drugs that they're taking, and these are not complications that run in their families. It's very obvious where these issues are stemming from.
Cole appreciates that they're not only reinforcing the executive order but also that they're going out of their way to target this issue on every front that they can because that's exactly what we have to do. This doesn't end with bans. We have to go all out and hold everybody who was involved accountable.
The Lawsuit Against Kaiser Permanente
Cole is suing Kaiser Permanente, which is her old healthcare provider, as well as the hospital where she underwent the surgery, her surgeon, her endocrinologist, and the psychologist who referred her to surgery for damages, fraud, and malpractice. She explains that the very basis of the treatment is fraudulent because sex and gender are the same thing, and sex is not something that you can change. No matter what parts of the body you chop off or change surgically, no matter what drugs you put somebody on, no matter how much you appear on the outside to look like the opposite sex.
They lied to her parents that this would make her better, that it would make her happier, that it would save her life, when really all the opposite things happened. She became a shell of the bubbly little girl she once was during that point in time, and she was closer to suicide more than she had ever been before.
There has been a huge development in her case recently, and her lawyers are very confident that they are going to go to trial. Cole wants to take every last penny from Kaiser and from her doctors for everything that they have done to her. She wants them to feel everything they have done tenfold. It's not about revenge. It is about accountability. It's about creating a precedent for every patient, for every young person, for every child, every family who was hurt in the way that she and her parents were.
The Fraudulent Basis of Gender Ideology
Cole explains that gender ideology contains ideas like that sex and gender exist on a spectrum, that somehow it is fluid but also transgender people are who they claim to be and this is something that will never go away. That's exactly why the testimonies of people like her who come out of it and speak to the truth are so threatening to them because it completely dismantles their ideology. That is why they go so hard after conservatives, after frankly anybody on the political continuum regardless of their other beliefs if they challenge this at all, and especially towards the children who have been victims to this.
The entire thing is a lie. Nobody knows that they're transgender because there's no such thing as being transgender. You are the way that you were born, and there's a million different ways that you can be yourself, but sex is something that is binary. It's a fact of life. It's something that we all have to grapple with. It's not easy being either a man or a woman, but we have to accept things that we can't change about ourselves.
Cole's feelings of discomfort around her sex and her body didn't immediately go away when she realized her regret around her transition. For years, she still experienced that. But nothing helped her more through it than radically accepting reality.
The Problem With Regret Statistics
When asked about how many kids that have gone through these procedures are detransitioning versus being happy with their lives, Cole explains that the statistics that are often brought up are between 7 to 1.5%, and these are taken from studies that she doesn't believe are conducted on children actually. They're very skewed in the way that they're performed. Often there's not really a standardized definition of regret across these studies, and they'll often exclude people like her who no longer identify as transgender because these are transgender surveys.
They're conducted in a period of time that is often anywhere from just after surgery within a few weeks to a few months to maybe a few years. But gender transition regret is understood to happen and be fully appreciated about 7 years to a decade or more after surgery. They're not giving these patients nearly enough time to fully understand that. They're also not giving them the terms either to be able to appreciate whether this is something that has benefited them or not.
Everything, basically all the information that they're given, is about the so-called benefits of these procedures, and being transgender is presented as an innate thing. It's all focused on the temporary feelings of the patient and not on basic reality. Cole didn't even know that detransition existed until it happened to her, and she didn't know that there was a word for it until months afterward.
Right now there are no codes, no standards of care for dealing with detransition or treating regret or even the complications that come from these procedures. So there's no way to properly report the rates of regret. Cole reported to every single one of her doctors who was involved in her transition and even those who weren't, including her endocrinologist, her surgeon, her psychologist, her therapist, even her primary care doctor. She asked them for help for different parts of the detransition process, including having her sex marker changed back in her files and changing her name back to her birth name. She still gets letters from Kaiser calling her Leo, calling her mister, calling her a young man even though she tried her absolute hardest to ask them to please honor her wishes to reflect reality.
State Resistance and the Path Forward
Cole acknowledges that there are some states that seem to be really doubling down on gender transition while others are very happy with the new rules. She explains that there's a lot of money that goes in and out of this industry, not just from the drugs and the surgeries and the medical process itself, but it's also become a very powerful political tool as we've seen over the years. The efforts of conservatives and moderates and sanely minded Democrats to fight against this are seen as a threat to the basic human rights of these individuals to getting their so-called life-saving care and living out their lives authentically, rather than trying to protect children and protect vulnerable young people.
That very lie has been extremely powerful, especially in blue states who are going in hard on this issue. Cole doesn't believe that it's entirely evil minds that are behind this either. She thinks that there are powerful people who are genuinely deluded into believing that this is something that is actually saving children, that there is an actual genocide being waged against a very vulnerable group of people. She believes some surgeons are actually thinking they're helping, though she still thinks that it's very evil of them to do so. It takes a great deal of cognitive dissonance to think that this benefits children in any way. But there are people out there who genuinely believe that. She also thinks though that there's a part of their soul and their basic human instincts that recognizes reality and they're actively working against this. They're actively working against that instinct and they are making a choice to ignore a very obvious fact.
Cole believes these new rules are going to ensure that almost every single hospital in the United States is going to stop doing these procedures. They're going to stop administering the drugs to children. They're going to stop operating on their healthy bodies. Some people argue, and sure they're right, that this doesn't affect private clinics, but those are really in the minority of the places that are promoting and performing these practices. It's going to make way for those clinics to be targeted and to have them stop doing these procedures as well in the future. Cole thinks that is going to come very soon, especially with a federal bill that is going to criminalize these procedures on children countrywide. It has just passed the House, and now they have to see if it's going to make it through the Senate, if it's going to be signed into law, and if it's going to stand the test of time in the courts.
So many people have come together in this movement from all different walks of life: people who like Cole have been personally affected by this, people who have watched this happen in their practices, in their clinics, in schools, people from everywhere across the political continuum who know this is wrong and have chosen to speak up. We're at a point in time when our own government is finally recognizing the necessity to fight back against this for the sake of future generations. Cole believes that as long as we keep up the momentum, as long as we keep fighting as hard as we are, we're going to win.
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