At 15 years old, I underwent surgery and it took less than a year for me to realize that every single part of this was a mistake.
I became a shell of the bubbly little girl I once was.
At Turning Point USA's Amfest conference, I sat down with prominent detransitioner and children rights advocate Chloe Cole.
The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them.
They told me, this is all your fault, and you are a waste of resources.
You are a waste of the love and support of your family.
You should shut up about this because you might scare somebody out of getting the care that they really need.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently spoke out against, quote, sex-rejecting procedures for gender dysphoria for minors and announced new rules that would restrict such treatment.
This is not medicine, it is malpractice.
This is what the children who have been harmed and regret this and their families who have been torn apart have been waiting to hear for years.
This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Chloe Cole, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me back.
So recently, HHS, the Health and Human Services in the U.S., has implemented new rules around what's been dubbed for now some years, gender-affirming care.
And HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. has actually spoke about this in no uncertain terms.
I'm going to play you a clip and I'm going to get your reaction.
Doctors assume a solemn obligation to protect children.
Yet doctors across the country now provide needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic oaths by endangering the very lives that they are sworn to safeguard.
The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children who suffer from gender dysphoria.
They betrayed the estimated 300,000 American youth ages 13 to 17, conditioned to believe that sex can be changed.
They betrayed their Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
So-called gender-affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people.
This is not medicine, it is malpractice.
The thing that I really appreciate about, that I really appreciate about this clip, and really I love the entire thing, but he calls it not gender-affirming care, but sex-rejecting procedures.
Because this treatment is not affirming anything but these children's misgivings about who they really are, their confusion, their normal adolescent discomfort that, frankly, everybody goes through and children who are more sensitive are more prone to.
But it's rejecting the very way that God beautifully created them in their mother's womb.
And I just love how he lays out how destructive this is and how he says this is not medicine, but malpractice.
This is what detransitioners, this is what the children who have been harmed and regret this, the young people who have been thrown out by this industry and their families who have been torn apart have been waiting to hear for years.
And to finally hear this, our concerns being echoed by the federal government is incredibly vindicating.
He mentions the number, 300,000.
What does that refer to exactly?
Can you lay that out for me?
I think he is referring to the amount of children between the ages of 13 to 17 who are in, who are either identified as transgender or currently in the gender clinic system.
And I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it were even higher because this might be the single most prevalent social contagion in my generation.
Why don't we start from the beginning?
You know, a number of people have seen your interviews on the show and elsewhere.
But for those that might not be familiar with you, tell me your story.
Tell me how is it that we came to be sitting here today?
So I represent a community of young people known as the transitioners who have been through the medical process of sex change procedures but have permanently chosen to go back.
Oftentimes it can be either because of regret or physical or psychological damages as a result of these procedures or simply accepting the fact that we cannot change.
That nothing we will ever do will ever make us the opposite sex.
But there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with the way that we were created.
And I went through the process when I was between the ages of 12 to 16 and it began with the administration of chemical castration agents to stop my natural puberty, which was quickly followed by weekly injections of high doses of testosterone to masculinize my body and make me appear and behave more like a young man.
At 15 years old, I underwent surgery to permanently get rid of my breasts, and it took less than a year for me to realize that every single part of this was a mistake, that this never should have happened to me, that as a child, I deserved better, and also that I wanted to advocate for other children who were in my situation because I knew that there are other kids out there.
I'd seen the other kids who were in the hospital system, some of which had already had surgery or were about to receive these procedures, and soon my suspicions were confirmed that I wasn't alone, that there were thousands and now an ever more growing group of people who are in my exact situation.
Many of them were also minors.
And I have dedicated the last four years of my life to ensuring that what happened to me is never going to happen to any other child in America and hopefully throughout the globe.
How old are you now?
I'm 21 years old.
So how is it that it came to your mind that this might be a good idea?
And I mean, that's what, let's, let's tackle that first, and then I have a whole bunch of other questions.
I mean, I suppose I've always been somewhere between being a stereotypical tomboy and a girly girl really early in my childhood.
And my dad once told me there was a point in time when I wouldn't even leave the house if I wasn't wearing a sparkly tutu or like really bright colors or hearts or sparkles.
But as I, there was also like a bit of a boyish streak to me, especially as I got older.
After a certain age, I think around the time that I hit puberty, I just preferred having my hair short and wearing boys' clothes.
And I just got along better with my older brothers and the boys around me at school.
And I found it really difficult to fit in with my female friends.
But I never thought of these things as character flaws.
I saw them as things that made me strong, that made me unique, that made me creative, until as I progressed through puberty, I just became more and more insecure.
And now I know that that's a very natural part of growing up for many people.
But I didn't know that.
And I wasn't really close to really any of my female role models.
So I didn't know how to properly navigate these feelings around my changing body and my developing breast and also the attention that I was getting for that at a very early age.
And I just, I wanted to cower away from the world.
I wanted to run away from these feelings.
I didn't believe that I was a boy, though, until that idea was put in my head.
I started using social media when I was about 11 years old.
I got my first phone just for my 12th birthday.
And I very quickly discovered this community of people who were very creative, who were very artistic, who thought outside of the box, who shared a lot of my interests of video games, cartoons.
But these weren't just superficial similarities.
This was a group of young people who ostensibly seemed to be like me in every single way, including sharing these same insecurities and difficulties that I had growing up.
And they called themselves transgender.
And it was primarily young women my age who also thought that they were tomboys until one day they decided that they actually were boys.
And with everything that I learned about this community, from the personal anecdotes to the medical literature around it that seemed to back this theory of sex and gender being separate and being on a spectrum, I thought more and more, this must be who I am.
Maybe I was never mom and dad's daughter.
I was actually their transgender son.
And that was how my transgender identity came to be.
You mentioned the term social contagion.
So explain how that fits into this.
So a lot of the transgender community and the activist community around it will claim that being transgender is innate.
That perhaps it's something that these people are born with.
Maybe there's like a physiological structure in the brain or the body or maybe a gene that makes somebody somehow the opposite sex, even if they have the reproductive system of the other sex.
But there is not a single inkling of a scientific basis to any of this.
But when you really look into the personal history of people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, it's not something that just occurs in a vacuum.
They often have psychological trauma that is concurrent alongside the distress stemming from early childhood trauma, often being neglected or abused or having a poor relationship with either one of their parental figures or sexual trauma is a big one.
There is often comorbidities of autism, of other intellectual disabilities, or cluster B personality disorders and the list goes on.
But these are people who are vulnerable in different ways, who are looking for a place where they feel like they can belong.
And many people who are struggling or just different in any way in going through the natural processes of adolescent struggles may find comfort in this community that claims to be Unwaveringly loving, who accept people for who they truly are, for who they say they are.
And there's also this festering ideology around it.
And for people who don't fit into the mold, it's so easy to get sucked in.
Paint me a picture of this gender ideology.
So there's these ideas like that sex are sex and gender exist on a spectrum that somehow it is fluid, but also transgender people are who they claim to be, and this is something that will never go away.
And that's exactly why the testimonies of people like me who come out of it, who speak to the truth, are so threatening to them because it completely dismantles their ideology.
And that is why they go so hard after conservatives, after, frankly, anybody on the political continuum, regardless of their other beliefs, if they challenge this at all, and especially towards the children who have been victim to this.
Yeah, there's, you know, I know there's this term turf, right?
And that's for people who tend to be on the left, like feminists that don't agree with gender ideology.
There's like a particular slur.
Right, it stands for trans exclusionary, radical feminist, even though many of the people who they apply the term to are not in any way either radical or feminist or exclusionary transgender people.
They just want to examine the truth, they want to speak to it, and they want to challenge, rightly so, this ideology that has infected our institutions, our culture, and torn apart families.
So, going back to the contagion part, I remember Abigail Schreier basically looked at this phenomenon that you would have these clusters of young women, girls, that would suddenly all become trans, right, all together.
And that was like, wait, wait, wait a second.
You know, the people that were not in any way thinking about this.
I mean, so it, I mean, your own experience, right?
Your own experience of, do you feel like you fell into this social contagion, or how did that work?
Absolutely.
I mean, I think if you really look at, if you observe the demographic shift that has happened with the diagnoses of gender dysphoria and with transgender identification, it becomes very clear just how much the element of social contagion is really fueling this.
It used to be primarily adult men, I think traumatized young boys, who identified as transgender or claimed to be the opposite sex or affiliate more with being a woman.
But in recent years, in really the past decade, we've seen a huge explosion in women and primarily young women and adolescent girls who are doing this instead.
And we already know that young women and teenage girls are already susceptible to social contagion.
We've seen this with eating disorder communities, with anorexia, bulimia, with body dysmorphia, plastic surgery, self-harm, cutting.
And I think this, I would argue that transgenderism has elements of every single one of those things in different ways.
And you never see this happening in a vacuum.
And it certainly wasn't the case for me.
It's extremely rare for girls on their own to start experiencing gender dysphoric ideation unless they're exposed to this in some way.
And that is exactly what happened to me.
Even though I had these feelings of discomfort around my body, around my sex, around the responsibilities that come with being female, I didn't actually believe myself to be a young man until I learned about it through seeing other young women do the same thing.
What about parents?
I mean, it might be difficult for some parents to understand how it would happen that parents would agree to this whole process that you described earlier.
Well, my mom and dad certainly were not prepared for the institutional uphill battle that they would be facing.
They thought they could trust the doctors.
And I think, frankly, any parent, even now, with the resource that we have, is probably not truly prepared in any way.
Because it feels like you're fighting against the world to save your child, to protect them.
Your instincts tell you what you knew from the very beginning when they were born.
That your child is a boy or a girl.
There's nothing wrong with them.
That maybe they're struggling.
But we don't have to confirm these feelings in order to make them feel better.
And my mom and dad were very sensible.
They were very cautious about this.
They did not want me to go through any of the medical process.
They did not want to have to raise me as a boy.
They knew that I wasn't transgender or their son.
I was their beautiful daughter.
But it was hard not to give in with the way that the doctors were manipulating them.
And I think that every single thing that my doctors were telling them was a complete lie of manipulation and coercion.
And the biggest lie was that my life was on the line, that I would kill myself if I wasn't given early enough intervention, if I wasn't medicated, if I wasn't experimented upon.
And this wasn't told to them just once.
They heard this dozens of times over the years when they were expressing their concerns, when they were pushing back against this.
When they said, we don't want her to go through this.
And I don't blame them for saying yes to the procedures.
Because I think that they were doing the best with everything they had done.
I mean, it sounds like you're saying they were basically blackmailed into it with your life being the blackmail.
Absolutely.
You know, Bobby Kennedy Jr., the HHS secretary, talked about violations of Hippocratic Oath with the doctors.
That's what I'm thinking about.
What do you make of that?
I think, I mean, I'll often have activists say, well, your doctors just didn't go with the standards of care at the time.
But for any doctor to do this to any child and arguably to any patient, regardless of how old they are, it's a violation of their very oath, do no harm.
The very first tenet of medicine.
This is a treatment that is not medicine, but it takes away some of the most beautiful parts of life to solve a temporary problem.
It's a physical treatment that rips away your ability to have children, to experience normal sexual function and healthy sexual relationships.
And it makes you disassociate from who you really are, which causes further mental distress in most patients who go through this.
And no child understands what they are about to go through if they go through this process.
Nothing about this is care.
As you were on this road, how did you figure out that this is a really wrong path?
Up until I had surgery, I didn't think I would have any regrets.
I genuinely was misled in believing that I was a young man, that this is going to fix me and make me feel more congruent with my supposed true self.
But, I mean, I thought that I was happy even.
I mean, part of it was the novel aspects of all the physical changes that were happening and as well as the social changes and starting to make friends as a young man and feel like I was actually starting to fit in in school.
But I think the surgery was the turning point.
And it made me realize just how destructive this was.
Not just to my body and to my innocence, but to my future and the path of my entire life going forward.
There was a little bit of a honeymoon period with the surgery, and then I had to face reality, look down at the bandages, the wounds, have to witness that every day on what was left of my breasts.
But beyond the physical recovery, I was also starting to mature a little bit.
I was 15, going on 16.
I was thinking about what my life would look like beyond what college, beyond what career I'd want to have.
And I started to learn more every day that I aspired to become a mother, that I wanted to have children of my own.
I took a developmental psychology class in my junior year of high school, and that was when it really hit me how beautiful it would be to carry on my legacy, to pass down my values.
And all my older siblings were having babies of their own at this point.
And I was a youngest child, so I never had the experience of babysitting or anything or seeing the beauty of innocence from an outside perspective.
And that was the single biggest reason why I detransitioned.
Because I realized that this might take away my ability to have children.
I didn't even know about the future of my reproductive health or the possibility that I'll be able to have any, still to this day.
But it was my burgeoning maternal instinct and realizing that some of the single biggest parts of my identity as an adult could be taken away if I didn't stop then.
Wow.
And I mean, I think what you're describing just highlights how crazy it is to consider doing something like this to a child.
Because how could you possibly know at 12 or 15 for that matter?
I mean, the entire thing is a lie.
Nobody knows that they're transgender because there's no such thing as being transgender.
You are the way that you were born.
And there's a million different ways that you can be yourself.
But sex is something that is binary.
It's a fact of life.
It's something that we all have to grapple with, and it's not easy being either a man or a woman, but we have to accept things that we can't change about ourselves.
And it's not like my feelings of discomfort around my sex and my body just immediately went away when I realized my regret around my transition.
For years, I still experienced that, but nothing helped me more through it than radically accepting reality.
Let's jump back to this, these new HHS rules, okay?
So, what's in there that's of interest?
Do you want to comment a little bit?
So, there's a few different measures that they have proposed.
The primary one is going to reinforce Trump's executive order from January to protect children from surgical and chemical mutilation.
And that primarily targets Medicare and Medicaid funding in hospitals that do these procedures on children under the age of 19.
So, they're going to create different rules that hospitals have to abide by.
Otherwise, they're going to lose their Medicare and Medicaid services, which almost every single hospital in the United States uses them.
So, that would be a huge blow to them.
It wouldn't make sense for them to continue doing these procedures on children if that were to happen to them.
And they're also going to target the manufacturers of breastbinders.
So, for those of you in the audience who are not familiar with what breastbinders are, they're these medical devices that they look like a tank top, but they're made out of compression material, and they basically work by squishing the breasts into the body,
which is associated with different health issues like asthma or create issues with breathing or cause something that's happened to me and a lot of my friends is the concaving of the rib cage.
This is more prominent in people who are already developing or they have larger breasts.
And there's so many more complications that I would not even be able to list today.
But they're also going to roll back the Biden administration's decision to consider gender dysphoria to be a disability and so require care for it, which care for them means these mutilative and castrating procedures.
And I would argue that gender dysphoria itself is not a disability, but these procedures lead to further health complications, and in some patients even lead to them becoming disabled.
I have friends who have mobility issues, who have to walk, who have to use walkers and canes when they're in their 20s because they've lost function in their joints and in their muscles.
Some of them have to deal with muscular atrophy or even, I mean, in the males, multiple sclerosis is a known complication.
That's a result of these drugs that they're taking.
And these are not complications that run in their families.
It's very obvious where these issues are stemming from.
So, I mean, I think I really appreciate that they're not only reinforcing the executive order, but also that they're going out of their way to target this issue on every front that they can because that's exactly what we have to do.
This doesn't end with bans.
We have to go all out in holding everybody who was involved accountable.
How would that look like in your mind?
It's something that has to be illegalized on both the state and federal level so that no child ever is going to be hurt ever again.
We have to address what happens in place of the affirmative model and of those who have already been hurt.
We have to go after the manufacturers of the drugs, of the medical devices that they are giving to children.
And we have to ensure that there are measures out for patients who have been affected.
And I also think that one of the biggest parts of holding these people accountable is through the court system.
And I think right now there are 20 or so public cases that have been filed.
Many of them have been unsuccessful.
They've either been thrown out or they have been stagnant.
But I've had a huge development in my case recently.
And my lawyers are very confident that we are going to go to trial.
And I want to suck out every last penny from Kaiser, from my doctors, for everything that they have done to me.
I want them to feel everything they have done tenfold.
And it's not about revenge.
It is about accountability.
It's about creating a precedent for every patient, for every young person, for every child, every family who is hurt in the way that I and my mom and dad were.
With this lawsuit, can you give me a brief kind of overview of what it is?
So I am suing Kaiser Permanente, which is my old healthcare provider, as well as the hospital where I underwent the surgery, my surgeon, my endocrinologist, and the psychologist who referred me to surgery.
So damages, fraud, and for malpractice.
What is the fraud exactly?
So there's these standards of care that come from this group called WPATH, which are presumably what's used to develop these procedures.
But can you flesh that out for me a little more?
I think the very basis of the treatment is fraudulent.
Because sex and gender are the same thing.
And sex is not something that you can change.
No matter what parts of the body you chop off or change surgically, no matter what drugs you put somebody on, no matter how much you appear on the outside to look like the opposite sex, and they lied to my mom and dad, that this would make me better, that it would make me happier, that it would save my life, when really all of the opposite things happened.
I became a shell of the bubbly little girl I once was during that point in time.
And I was closer to suicide more than I had ever been before.
And the outcomes, when you look at the outcomes for children, unfortunately, we don't have enough data to back any of this for anybody, but especially for a developing body and mind.
But what we do know already from what we have observed and from the thousands of anecdotes of children who have been harmed, it's pretty damning.
Is there a sense of how many kids that have actually gone through these procedures are detransitioning versus maybe happy with their lives?
I don't know, right?
So the statistics that they'll often bring up are between like 0.7 to 1.5%.
And these are taken from studies that I don't believe are conducted on children, actually.
But they're very skewed in the way that they're performed.
Oftentimes, there's not really a standardized definition of regret across these studies.
And they'll often exclude people like me who no longer identify as transgender because these are transgender surveys.
And they're conducted in a period of time that is often anywhere from like just after surgery within like a few weeks to a few months to maybe a few years.
But transgender gender transition regret is understood to happen and be fully appreciated about seven years to a decade or more after surgery.
And they're not giving these patients nearly enough time to fully understand that.
But they're also not giving them the terms either to be able to appreciate whether this is something that has benefited them or not.
Everything, basically all the information that they're given is about the so-called benefits of these procedures and being transgender is presented as an innate thing.
It's all focused on the temporary feelings of the patient and not on basic reality.
I mean, I didn't even know that detransition existed until it happened to me.
And I didn't know that there was a word for it until months afterward.
There's no, and right now there's no codes, there's no standards of care for dealing with detransition or treating regrets or even the complications that come from these procedures.
So there's no way to properly report the rates of regret.
And to speak personally, and to speak from my experience, Mirror is that of many detransitioners as well.
I reported to every single one of my doctors who was involved in my transition, and even those who weren't.
My endocrinologist, my surgeon, my psychologist, my therapist, even my primary care doctor, I asked them with help for different parts of the detransition process, including having my sex marker changed back in my files and changing my name back to my birth name.
I still get letters from Kaiser calling me Leo, calling me Mr., calling me a young man, even though I tried my absolute hardest to ask them to please honor my wishes to reflect reality.
You know, I keep thinking this is also in the context of huge social pressure to not have regret or to not show regret.
So there's that.
How is the community treat detransitionist treat you?
I laugh because it's so comically awful how they treated me from the very beginning.
Before I was involved with politics, before I was a public speaker, the moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them.
I was subhuman even.
They told me, they immediately turned their backs on me.
They were quick to blame me.
They told me, this is all your fault.
Don't put this on us.
You were the one who said yes.
You were the one who wanted this.
You were a complete idiot for not knowing that you weren't truly transgender.
So don't come crying to us.
And you should shut up about this because you might scare somebody out of getting the care that they really need.
And you are a waste of resources.
You were a waste of the love and support of your family.
You didn't deserve the support of your doctors.
You didn't deserve any of this.
So stay quiet and stop being a problem.
This is what people said.
And they said even worse.
There were people who were trying to compel me to retransition, people who were trying to tell me to kill myself, even, just for the fact that I was going against the dogma.
And I stayed low for a little bit.
I apologized to the same people who were abusing me because I was a freshly traumatized 16-year-old girl.
I had been bullied in school before, but nobody had ever treated me this horribly over such a painful part of my life.
But after a while of being painfully isolated, I started to really think the way that they are treating me is not deserved.
I'm speaking to nothing but my experience, the way that I feel, and to reality.
I'm going to speak up regardless of whether they want me to or not.
And I just knew that there had to be other detransitioners out there, and very quickly I learned that they were in the thousands.
And I'm sure that it's doubled, tripled, quadrupled over the years, the amount of us who are out there.
We are never going to know the real numbers, but I'm grateful that I chose to speak up and that God has given me the strength in order to do so.
And some of the harassment, the hatred I faced over the years has gotten worse.
I've been doxxed.
I have had people assaulting me, chasing after me in government buildings who have tried to hurt me, who have wished death upon me.
But I've also received an infinite amount more love.
And I'm not chasing validation.
I don't care how people feel about this.
I just want something to get done.
That's why I'm in this.
What do you make of the fact that whatever Health and Human Services may have put in this pediatric report, gender transition report, and these new rules, that there's some states that seem to be really doubling down on this, while others are very happy with the new rules?
Well, there's a lot of money that goes in and out of this industry, not just from the drugs and the surgeries and the medical process itself, but it's also become a very powerful political tool, as we've seen over the years.
The efforts of conservatives and moderates and sanely minded Democrats to fight against this are Seen as a threat to the basic human rights of these individuals, who are getting their so-called life-saving care and living out their lives authentically,
rather than trying to protect children and protect vulnerable young people.
And that very lie has been extremely powerful in especially blue states who are going in hard on this issue.
And I don't believe that it's entirely evil minds that are behind this either.
I think that there are people, there are powerful people who are genuinely deluded into believing that this is something that is actually saving children, that there is an actual genocide being waged against children, against a very vulnerable group of people.
Yeah, I mean, and this is the huge challenge.
I agree with you.
I think that's right.
I think there's people who are cynical about it, but then there's people who are just caught up in it.
Do you think any of these surgeons are actually thinking they're helping?
I do.
I still think that it's very evil of them to do so.
And I do think that it takes a great deal of cognitive dissonance to think that this benefits children in any way.
But there are people out there who genuinely believe that.
But I also think, though, that there is a part of their soul and their basic human instincts that recognizes reality.
And they're actively working against this.
They're actively working against that instinct.
And they are making a choice to ignore it.
A very obvious fact.
So, Chloe, as we finish up, how do these new rules from HHS change the game?
And what's the path forward?
I think it's going to ensure that almost every single hospital in the United States is going to stop doing these procedures.
They're going to stop administering the drugs to children.
They're going to stop operating on their healthy bodies.
And some people argue, and sure, they're right, that this doesn't affect private clinics, but those are really in the minority of the places that are promoting and performing these practices.
And it's going to make way for those clinics to be targeted and to have them stop doing these procedures as well in the future.
And I think that is going to come very soon.
Especially with, well, it's an uphill battle in some states to pass laws to criminalize these procedures in children.
But we have this federal bill that is going to do so countrywide.
And it has just passed the House.
Now, it's going to be, we have to see if it's going to make it through the Senate, if it's going to be signed into law, and if it's going to stand the test of time in the courts.
And I really hope that that is the case.
But so many people have come together in this movement from all different walks of life.
People who, like me, have been personally affected by this.
People have watched this happen in their practices in their clinics, in schools.
People from everywhere across the political continuum who know that this is wrong and have chosen to speak up.
And we're at a point in time when our own government is finally recognizing the necessity to fight back against this for the future for the sake of future generations.
And I think that as long as we keep up the momentum, as long as we keep fighting as hard as we are, we're going to win.
Well, Chloe Cole, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much for having me again.
Thank you all for joining Chloe Cole and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.