Chloe Cole this week told a Washington, D.C. think tank that she was coerced into taking puberty blockers and having her breasts surgically removed.
She was 15 years old.
“It’s important to know how awful it really is,” Cole told the Heritage Foundation about her double mastectomy.”Really, it’s like Nazi-era experiments.”
Cole, 18, de-transitioned when she was 16. Today she is a passionate activist against transgenderism and the gender-identity ideology that she says is routinely making victims out of young people like herself.
Cole is one of several experts scheduled to appear at a panel discussion in Pewaukee later this month to discuss ways to combat the woke indoctrination occurring in Wisconsin’s schools.
“Stolen Innocence: A Panel on the Insidious Ideology Infecting Your Children’s Education”, is scheduled for 6-9 p.m., Jan. 26 at the Ingleside Hotel in Pewaukee. Tickets are $10, $40 including a 5 p.m. cocktail hour.
The event is sponsored by Parents on Patrol, an organization “of individuals working to inform and educate parents and taxpayers about the insidious woke agenda in America schools,” according to the educational nonprofit group.
The national nonprofit No Left Turn in Education is co-sponsoring the session. Both groups say they emphasize the “role of the parent as the primary custodian and authority of their child.”
Alexandra Schweitzer, a southeast Wisconsin parents rights activist, will host the event.
“We want to educate parents, give them a toolkit on how they can stop the woke agenda in their schools,” Schweitzer told Empower Wisconsin.
From the focus on skin color and divisiveness of critical race theory to the gender-identity ideology push, many parents have had quite enough of the woke takeover, Schweitzer said. For young people like Chloe Cole, the consequences have been heartbreaking.
“Social media introduced this idea that I could be a boy,” Cole told The Daily Signal Podcast this week.
She began telling her friends and family that she was a boy when she was 12 after she was introduced to gender-identity ideology on social media. She started taking testosterone and puberty blockers at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15.
She realized she had made a terrible mistake.
“I decided to stop transitioning entirely,” Cole says. “It was too much for me, and I knew that I couldn’t keep lying to myself.”
Cole has said she plans to sue the doctors who approved her surgery and “gender-affirming care.”
The panel discussion also will include:
Jaimee Michell, founder and president of Gays Against Groomers — a coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of Children, according to the group’s website.
Sara Higdon, an Army veteran and Bronze Star recipient who, as a transexual woman, hosts the TRANSform to Freedom podcast and is communications director for Trans Against Groomers.
Jeanette Cooper, co-founder of Partners for Ethical Care. Its mission, according to its website, is to “raise awareness and support efforts to stop the unethical treatment of children by schools, hospitals, and mental and medical healthcare providers under the duplicitous banner of gender identity affirmation. We believe that no child is born in the wrong body.”
Cory Brewer, attorney at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty focusing on legal and policy issues related to K-12 education. The Milwaukee-based public interest law firm has done a lot of legal work in the field of parental rights.
“WILL has been contacted by parents all around the state concerned about what is going on in their school districts,” Brewer said. “There’s a lack of transparency and engagement with parents going on right now. We think this is a valuable event to be a part of to let parents know what they can do at a local level.”
Some conservative state lawmakers say they will make parental rights in education a crusade again this year, after Democrat Gov. Tony Evers vetoed legislation last session aimed at requiring greater transparency and accountability in the state’s K-12 schools.
State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) on Wednesday issued a statement saying she will not “support adding one more dollar to a broken education system that has vacated the mission of teaching children reading, writing and arithmetic and substituted it with racism and sexism.”
“I call upon my republican colleagues to join me in insisting that our precious resources, provided by the taxpayers, are used in a responsible manner,” said Brandtjen, a candidate for the 8th Senate District seat. “The only increases that should be included in the next budget are increases in accountability, which are clearly lacking. Public education has no business glorifying and promoting propaganda about race, gender or sexuality. Encouraging transgender lifestyles in children is nothing short of child abuse.”
That point of view has garnered some threats against parental rights activists.
Schweitzer said she has received threatening communications after announcing she would serve as emcee of the panel discussion.
“One said he’d be surprised if I lived to host the event,” she said.
“They’re not going to scare me. I’m not going to back down to a terrorist,” Schweitzer added. “Our children deserve better than they’re getting right now.”
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M.D. Kittle is a senior reporter at Wisconsin Spotlight.
Photo “Chloe Cole” by Chloe Cole.
