Detransitioner Chloe Cole appeared before a House subcommittee Thursday, testifying that transgender hormone drugs and surgeries “ruined” her childhood and left her with “lifelong irreversible harm.”
Cole, 19, who now serves as a senior fellow and patient advocate at Do No Harm, an organization that seeks to “protect patients, physicians, and healthcare itself from the practice of medicine based on discriminatory, divisive ideologies,” testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance at the hearing titled “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care.’”
“My goal in going to DC was to bring compassion and clarity to a subject that has been previously missing those things on the national scale,” Cole posted to Twitter along with the video of her testimony.
My full opening statement from the congressional hearing.
My goal in going to DC was to bring compassion and clarity to a subject that has been previously missing those things on the national scale. pic.twitter.com/RNxxeZpkzs
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) July 28, 2023
In her testimony, Cole identified herself as someone who “used to believe I was born in the wrong body, and adults in my life whom I trusted affirmed my belief, causing me lifelong, irreversible harm.”
Cole candidly explained the devastating problem before an increasing number of children and teens:
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 this scandal to an end and ensure that other vulnerable teenagers, children, and young adults don’t go through what I went through.
Sharing her journey through the world of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” Cole said she began to experience gender dysphoria at the age of 12:
I was well into 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 I felt like a boy, in retrospect all I meant was that I hated puberty, that I wanted this newfound sexual attention to go away, that I looked up to my brothers a bit more than to my sisters.
After coming out as transgender at home, Cole said her parents were “immediately concerned,” but made the “mistake” of obtaining “outside help from medical professionals.”
“It immediately set our entire family down a path of ideologically-motivated deceit and coercion,” she said. “The gender specialist I was taken to see told my parents that I needed 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?’”
Cole explained to the lawmakers the fear this “transition-or-die” narrative strikes in the hearts of parents:
This was the moment we all became victims of so-called “gender-affirming care.” I was fast tracked 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.
The testosterone “caused permanent changes to my body,” Cole said. “My voice will forever be deeper, my jawline sharper, my nose longer, my bone structure permanently masculinized, my Adam’s apple more prominent, and my fertility unknown. I look in the mirror sometimes and feel like a monster.”
Cole went on to have a double mastectomy at age 15.
“They tested my amputated breasts for cancer; I was cancer free, of course,” she said. “I was perfectly healthy. There was 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 they were incinerated,” she shared. “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.”
Cole bluntly described her current issues with sexual dysfunction, the “massive scars” on her chest, and the skin grafts the gender surgeons used, that are now “weeping fluid.”
After her surgery, Cole told the members of Congress her grades in school “plummeted,” and she became suicidal:
Everything that I went through did nothing to address the underlying mental health issues that I had. 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.
“I am doing better now, but my parents almost got the dead daughter promised to them by my doctors,” she stated. “My doctors had almost created the very nightmare they said they were trying to avoid.”
Her message, Cole said, is that, instead of so-called “gender-affirming care,” she needed “compassion,” “to be loved,” “to be given therapy to help me work through my issues, not affirmed in my delusion that transforming into a boy would solve 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 in 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 as 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.
“My childhood was ruined along with thousands of detransitioners that I know through our networks,” Cole asserted to lawmakers. “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.”
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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Chloe Cole” by Chloe Cole.
