(LifeSiteNews) — The formerly gender-confused, now outspoken “detransitioner” Chloe Cole made a powerful plea before lawmakers to stop the “barbaric” sex “transitions” of children.
Cole shared before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday how the affirmation of her belief that she was “born into the wrong body” through cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery administered when she was a child caused her “lifelong, irreversible harm.”
“I hope that you will have the courage to bring this scandal to an end so that other vulnerable teenagers, children and young adults don’t go through what I went through,” Cole told legislators.
Now 19, Cole shared that what was diagnosed as “gender dysphoria” at age 12 she sees in retrospect as an aversion to puberty and discomfort with the newfound male attention that came with it. When she “came out” as “transgender” to her parents, however, they felt she needed the help of medical professionals who did not recognize this fact.
“This proved to be a mistake. It immediately set our family down a path of ideologically motivated deceit and coercion,” Cole said.
This “coercion” began with her gender specialist’s suggestion to her parents that she would commit suicide if she did not undergo cross-sex interventions.
“They asked my parents a simple question: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son?” she recounted, even though she was not suicidal, as she later clarified.
With that, her parents consented to her reception of puberty blockers and her first testosterone injection at age 13, which rendered her voice “forever” deeper, her bone structure more masculinized, and her “Adam’s apple more prominent,” to the degree that she sometimes feels “like a monster.”
At age 15, she had a double mastectomy, leaving “massive scars” across her chest and depriving her of the ability to ever breast-feed.
After surgery, her grades plunged, and none of the attempts to change her sex did anything to treat her “underlying mental health issues,” she shared. In fact, they made them much worse.
“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,” Cole said.
“However, at 16, after my surgery, I did become suicidal. I’m doing better now, but my parents almost got the dead daughter promised to them by my doctors. They almost created the very nightmare they said they were trying to avoid,” she said.
Cole emphasized that she needed love, compassion, and therapy to help her “work through” her struggles, not affirmation in her “delusion that by transforming into a boy it would solve all of my problems.”
She pointed out that instead of celebrating her 19th birthday with her family at home, she was spending her time that day making a “desperate plea” to her elected representatives.
“Learn the lessons from other medical scandals like the opioid crisis. Recognize that doctors are humans too, and sometimes they are wrong,” Cole said.
“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,” she concluded.
Along with Cole, other witnesses spoke out both for and against so-called “gender affirming care” for children, including a former teammate of the gender-confused swimmer “Lia” Thomas.
One of the witnesses advocating “trans” interventions for children, Shannon Minter, a woman who identifies as a man, claimed Cole’s experience was “the exception, not the rule,” insisting that most minors who undergo “trans” interventions “really need them.”
Minter, along with other “trans” minor advocates on the panel, framed the issue as something parents should be able to decide alone, as opposed to the “government.”
They also noted that the most prominent medical associations in the U.S. have endorsed “trans” interventions for minors with gender dysphoria.
They further argued that such surgeries and hormonal treatments improve mental health outcomes and quality of life for the gender confused.
However, it is not uncommon for detransitioners to admit that their attempt to change their sex was a kind of “band-aid” approach to dissociate from emotional distress, with some of them pointing out that it gave a temporary relief.
For example, Jalisa Vine, in testimony on how gender surgeries ruined her life, explained that her “transition was a trauma response” and that her “whole identity has been rooted in trauma.”
Similarly, Grace Lidinsky-Smith, who received “top surgery” at age 23 and “detransitioned” about 16 months later, explained in an interview with The New York Times, “I slowly came to terms with the fact that it had been a mistake born out of a mental health crisis.”
Studies indicate that most children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence.
Significantly, the largest existing study on gender “transitions,” according to JAMA, has been corrected in 2020 to conclude that there is “no mental health benefit from gender-affirming surgery after comparison with a control group of [gender-confused] people who had not yet undergone surgery.”
Experts also warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature, as attested to by many individuals who “detransitioned” back to their true sex.
Emily Mangiaracina
Emily Mangiaracina is a Miami-based journalist for LifeSiteNews. She is a 2013 graduate of the University of Florida. Emily is most passionate about the Traditional Latin Mass and promoting the teachings of the Catholic Church.
