Chloe Cole, age 19, is a detransitioner whose life was ruined by this procedure. She spoke before Congress. She was 12 when she started experiencing puberty and wasn’t sure about herself. She told her parents that she thought she was transgender and the worried parents erroneously contacted medical professionals. Cole’s testimony disagrees with what the Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, said.
The detransitioner trusted the adults
In her life. She thought they, especially her parents, were doing what they thought they needed to do. “I used to believe that I was born in the wrong body and the adults in my life, whom I trusted, affirmed my belief and this caused me lifelong, irreversible harm.”
But she now sees how wrong it all is.
“I speak to you today as a victim of one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of the United States of America. I speak to you in the hope that you will have the courage to bring the scandal to an end, and ensure that other vulnerable teenagers, children and young adults don’t go through what I went through. My childhood was ruined. This needs to stop. You alone can stop it. Enough children have already been victimized by this barbaric pseudoscience. Please let me be your final warning,”
The detransitioner sees the mistake
The medical professionals guided worried parents down a wrong path. “But this proved to be a mistake. It immediately set our entire family down a path of ideologically motivated deceit and coercion. The gender specialist I was taken to see told my parents that I need to be put on puberty-blocking drugs right away. They asked my parents a simple question: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son?” Her family “became victims of so-called gender-affirming care.”
At age 13 she started receiving testosterone injections. These
“caused permanent changes in my body, my voice will forever be deeper, my jawline sharper, my nose longer, my bone structure permanently masculinized, my Adam’s apple more prominent, my fertility unknown. I look in the mirror sometimes, and I feel like a monster. I had a double mastectomy at 15. They tested my amputated breasts for cancer. That was cancer-free, of course, I was perfectly healthy. After my breasts were taken away from me, the tissue was incinerated. Before I was able to legally drive, I had a huge part of my future womanhood taken from me.”
The detransitioner struggles with what’s been done
“I will never be able to breastfeed. I struggle to look at myself in the mirror at times. I still struggle to this day with sexual dysfunction. And I have massive scars across my chest and the skin grafts that they used, that they took off my nipples, are weeping fluid today, and they’re grafted into a more masculine positioning, they said. After surgery, my grades in school plummeted. Everything that I went through did nothing to address the underlying mental health issues that I had, and my doctors with their theories on gender thought that all my problems would go away as soon as I was surgically transformed into something that vaguely resembled a boy. Their theories were wrong. The drugs and surgeries changed my body, but they did not and could not change the basic reality that I am, and forever will be, a female. When my specialists first told my parents they could have a dead daughter or a live transgender son, I wasn’t suicidal. I was a happy child who struggled because she was different. However at 16, after my surgery, I did become suicidal. We need to stop telling 12-year-olds that they were born wrong, that they are right to reject their own bodies and feel uncomfortable with their own skin. We need to stop telling children that puberty is an option, that they can choose what kind of puberty they will go through, just like they can choose what clothes to wear or what music to listen to. Puberty is a rite of passage to adulthood, not a disease to be mitigated.”
Cole responded to comments made by a mom who supported transitioning, Myriam Reynolds. “I understood that Mrs. Reynolds is scared for her child. And I just want to set the record straight that I don’t hate her, I don’t think anybody in this room hates her. In fact, I see my own mother and my own father in her.” Cole began to cry.
“And that clearly, she really loves her child, and she’s been doing the best with what she’s been given. And unfortunately, it’s not much. And for that, I’m sorry. I mean I think every parent deserves the utmost grace and guidance with how to help their child. That being said, I don’t wish for a child to have [the] same result as I did. I don’t wish for anybody to regret transition and de-transition, because it’s incredibly difficult. It comes with its own difficulties, and it’s not easy. And I hope that her child gets to have a happy and fulfilling adulthood.”
