Chloe Cole: My name is Chloe Cole and I’m a new detransitioner. Another way to put that would be, 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.
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 what I went through. At the age of 12, I began to experience what my medical team would later diagnose as gender dysphoria. I was well into an early puberty, and I was very uncomfortable with the changes that were happening to my body. I was intimidated by male attention and when I told my parents that I felt like a boy, in retrospect, all I meant was that I hated puberty. I wanted this new found sexual tension to go away, and I looked up to my brothers a little bit more than I did to my sister’s.
I came out as transgender in a letter I set on the dining room table. My parents were immediately concerned. They felt like they needed to get outside help from medical professionals, 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 needed to be put on puberty drugs right away. They asked my parents a simple question, would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son? The choice was enough for my parents to let their guard down and, in retrospect, I can’t blame them. This is the moment that we all became victims of so called gender affirming care.
I was fast track onto puberty blockers and then testosterone. The resulting menopausal like hot flashes made focusing on school impossible. I still get joint pains and weird pops in my back, but they were far worse when I was on the blockers.
A month later, when I was 13, I had my first testosterone injection. It’s caused permanent changes to my body. My voice will forever be deeper. My jaw align sharper, my nose longer, my bone structure permanently masculinized, my Adams apple more prominent, my fertility unknown. I look in the mirror sometimes and I feel like a monster. I had a double mastectomy at 16. They tested my amputated breasts for cancer and I was was cancer free, of course. I was perfectly healthy. There is nothing wrong with my still developing body, or my breasts, other than that as an insecure teenage girl, I felt awkward about it.
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. I will never be able to breastfeed. I struggle to look at myself in the mirror at times. I still, I still struggle to this day with sexual dysfunction. And I have massive scars across my chest and skin grafts that they used, that they took of my nipples, are weeping fluid today. And they were grafted into a more masculine position they said. After surgery my grades in school plummeted. Everything that I went through did nothing to address my 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 that hey 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. I’m doing better now, but my parents almost thought the dead daughter promised to them by my doctors, my doctors had almost createdthe very nightmare they said they were trying to avoid.
So what message do I want to bring to American teenagers and their families? I didn’t need to be lied to. I needed compassion. I need to be loved. I need to be getting therapy to help me work to my issues, not affirming of my delusion that by transforming into a boy, it would solve all my problems. 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 thorough, just so they can choose what clothes to wear or music to listen to. Puberty is a right of passage to adulthood, not a disease to be mitigated. Today I should be at home with my family celebrating my 19th birthday, instead I am making a desperate plea to my elected representatives. Learn the lessons from other medical scandals like the opioid crisis, to recognize that doctors are human too, and sometimes they are wrong. My childhood was ruined, along with thousands of detransitioners that I know through our networks. 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. Thank you.
Rep. Mike Johnson: Today’s your birthday?
Chloe Cole: It is.
Rep. Mike Johnson: You’re a beautiful, brave woman. Thank you for being here.
