Chloe Cole: The Dark Side of Unconditional Gender Affirmation

“We bar kids … from being able to drink or smoke cigarettes or buy marijuana or rent a car. I’ve been traveling a lot and sometimes I can’t even get a hotel room because I’m under the age of 21. And yet, I still was able to get my breasts removed when I was 15,” says Chloe Cole.

“I fell into the delusion that I was actually a boy just living within a girl’s body,” Cole says. She began taking puberty blockers and then testosterone at age 13. She got a double mastectomy at age 15. And at age 16, she realized she had made a terrible mistake.

Cole shares her story and why she is going to sue the medical group and hospital that facilitated and advised her and her parents on her medical transition.

“They said that there was less than a one to two percent regret rate,” Cole says. “And they never brought up what might happen, what the process would look like for that to happen. I didn’t even know that it was possible until it happened to me … They said that it was really a matter of life or death if I wasn’t allowed to transition.”

Interview trailer:

Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/chloe-cole-the-dark-side-of-unconditional-gender-affirmation_5062267.html

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Chloe Cole, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Chloe Cole:

Yes. Thank you so much for having me here.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re here at this summit on ending gender ideology here in Washington, DC.

Ms. Cole:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why don’t we just start with that. Tell me what you were talking about.

Ms. Cole:

Yes. That was at the Heritage Foundation Building. On the second day of the summit, I gave an account of my experiences transitioning as a minor.

Mr. Jekielek:

This was a long path for you, and it started very, very early. I think you were only 12.

Ms. Cole:

Yes, I was 12 when I first started identifying as transgender.

Mr. Jekielek:

Give me a picture of what happened. For some people it’s even hard to imagine how you get that idea.

Ms. Cole:

In order to get into that, I do have to talk about my early childhood. From a pretty young age, my parents were constantly in a fight with both my school and my doctors. I had some difficulties with things like getting my assignments done or staying organized in class. I also had some issues socializing and getting along with other kids my age, especially girls.

My teachers noticed this and they suggested to my parents that I might be on the spectrum. But when my parents tried to get me diagnosed with autism, the physician just said, “There’s no way that she’s autistic. She’s too smart.” That was the answer they got, and they were refused a second opinion. But I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was around six or seven, and then they started putting me on medication for it at age 10.

So, I wasn’t the easiest kid to raise. I was a bit of a tomboy growing up. I’ve got two older brothers. Growing up, I would play with their toys and play video games with them and play in the dirt, things like that. I did have a feminine side, but as I got older, I started to feel almost ashamed about that and I repressed that part of me. I think it was due in part to the teasing that I got from boys. Then eventually when I was in middle school, I started to feel inadequate compared to other girls and women.

I started using social media and there was a specific body type and certain features that were presented as the ideal that I felt like I couldn’t really match up to. At the time I didn’t really understand it. A lot of what I was going through as a kid was pretty normal, but I never really had these conversations with anybody growing up.

When I got my first phone, everybody in my class was using apps like Snapchat and Instagram, and I made my first Instagram account. I was seeing a lot of things that I guess you’d say were either questionable or just not really easy for an 11-year-old to understand, not only the images of young women that I was seeing, but also the content posted by other people my age.

I started getting exposed to a lot of feminist ideology. It implanted this idea in my head that being a woman in this world was awful and dangerous. A lot of the women and girls that I talked to growing up would complain about getting their periods and having to go through the physical changes of puberty, their fear of becoming pregnant and giving birth, and eventually getting older, aging, going through that process and going through menopause.

It was often talked about in a negative light. Hearing all this stuff about growing from a girl into a woman without being told about the benefits that really come with it made me not want that for myself. Some of the posts that I was reading even said things like, “Oh, we’ve historically been oppressed and it’s still that way.” Some even said that it was getting worse, that our reproductive rights are being taken away. It was quite scary for me to be reading all of that at a young age.

At roughly the same time, in the online communities that I was browsing, I was a nerdy kid. I liked my video games and cartoons and things like that. In a lot of the communities based around those topics, there happened to be a lot of people around my age in their early teens to their 20s where there seemed to be a lot of overlap between that and identifying as LGBT or gay or bisexual or transgender.

The algorithms and the content that I was seeing started to shift. I started seeing content that was focused specifically on the topic of sexuality or gender identity. A lot of them were infographics about the process of transitioning and how gender dysphoria works. I started noticing some parallels with myself, especially with the gender stuff. First, I started questioning maybe what if I’m bisexual or pansexual, and then it became questioning of my gender identity.

After being exposed to all that for some time, and especially at such an impressionable age, it was a natural progression, and there is an appeal for kids. It’s all these phrases and these colorful flags, and even almost a culture around it that draws you in, especially if you’re a kid who struggles to socialize in-person and doesn’t really have much of a community. That was definitely me.

At some point, I decided that it just made sense that I wasn’t actually a girl and that I was instead a boy. There was one theory that I read that the reason why people experience gender dysphoria is because they actually have the brain of the opposite sex. And so, that makes them take on characteristics and behaviors that are more frequently associated with one sex or the other. This has been debunked several times, but I was only 12 and I was impressionable.

Mr. Jekielek:

And there’s this whole world that you were in, an online world, that reinforced all of this.

Ms. Cole:

Yes. At school, I did struggle a bit to make friends, especially after I moved schools before middle school. So I turned to the internet. At first, I started just cutting my hair a little bit shorter each time I got a haircut, then buying more clothing from the boys section. Then eventually, I decided to change my name and I came out to some people at school, some people online, and my oldest sister. Eventually, after a few months, I decided that I wanted to go through the process of medically transitioning.

It was scary, and I knew that I would have to at least talk to my parents about it and get them on board with it. I wasn’t sure how they would react. It’s really a big conversation to have, and as a parent, that’s not really something you would expect to hear out of your kid. I knew this at the time, and I wanted to allow them some time to think about it.

I started the conversation through a letter that I left on the coffee table, actually. They were surprised, but they wanted to support me. They were cautious. They weren’t really sure what to do. They decided maybe we should try to get to the bottom of this and get a professional involved so that we know how to deal with this.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just a quick question. Up to now, this is you interacting with people online, and reading things. There are no teachers, medical professionals, or anybody else involved.

Ms. Cole:

No, I never saw anything like that. I never saw anything about this subject in school, actually. I graduated last year. It was never discussed in any class I had, actually. But at this point in time, I wasn’t really directly interacting with people about this subject specifically online either . I was mostly just following or viewing these communities, but it still left a pretty considerable impact on me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Sure, clearly.

Ms. Cole:

The power of suggestion.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, absolutely. You’ve told your parents now, so what happens?

Ms. Cole:

Yes, they decided it was a good idea to start sending me to a therapist. They didn’t get what they wanted and what I really needed. The causes behind my dysphoria were really never explored. Instead, it was really just like, “Oh, okay. You say you’re a boy and you want to be referred to by this name. Yeah, that’s true. You’re a boy.” No real questioning.

I was referred to a general specialist after about a month or so, and I had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Shortly after that, I started expressing to my parents and my physicians that I had a desire to transition medically.

My mom and dad pushed back on this, actually, especially my dad. He wanted me to wait until I was 18. He didn’t want to have me make such a complicated decision at such a young age. He wanted to leave that responsibility to me when I was legally an adult. But they were effectively coerced into allowing me to do this, because the medical professionals talked to them about it.

They said that there’s less than a one to two per cent regret rate when people would transition. They never brought up what might happen, or what the process would look like for that to happen. I didn’t even know that it was possible until it happened to me.

Mr. Jekielek:

The regret rate?

Ms. Cole:

Yes. My dad asked about that. That was what they told him. They never presented any other options to them. They just cited the suicide statistics. They said that it was really a matter of life or death if I wasn’t allowed to transition.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’ve often heard, and people have told me on this show, that it’s very common for parents and kids and even adults who are thinking about this to be told, “If you don’t let your kid transition, they’re going to commit suicide.”

Ms. Cole:

I don’t remember them saying this to me. They actually told that to my parents while I was out of the room even. I didn’t believe this at the time. I wasn’t suicidal until I was about 14 or 15, a year or so after I started these treatments. But the way I saw it at the time was that it was a condition that I had, and because it was a condition, it needed to be treated, and this was the treatment.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you’re 13, and you are beginning the process of medical transition. What does that look like?

Ms. Cole:

After only about a half-a-year between getting the diagnosis, I was referred to an endocrinologist. I would be put on blockers. Then after I got my first blocker shot, about a month later, I had gotten my prescription for testosterone as well. So, it was really quite quick.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s almost unbelievable. Were you told of the potential side effects of these treatments?

Ms. Cole:

They did list some side effects on the consent forms. They weren’t comprehensive. They didn’t list some commonly known side effects. But I was told that the testosterone, or really the lack of estrogen in my body, would cause an atrophy in certain reproductive organs. I was also told that it might affect my ability to conceive children as an adult.

But I was 13 at the time when I consented, when I signed off on these. I wasn’t thinking about having kids. I was being expected to make an adult decision on things that I had no experience with and no knowledge on.

Mr. Jekielek:

It really does sound like that, doesn’t it? Let’s go a little further along the way. Very quickly, you’re on puberty blockers, you’re on testosterone. Then what happens?

Ms. Cole:

In the amount of time between starting the blockers and the testosterone, after all the hormones were cleared out of my body, I was in a state of what could be considered an artificial menopause. It caused me to experience hot flashes and itching all over my body. It did make me lethargic and I struggled to focus just a little bit more in class. I pretty much woke up every day just hoping for the next big step, which for me was testosterone.

When I started on the testosterone, I felt great. I finally had hormones back in my body. I had my energy back, and I had my appetite back. Very shortly after, I started seeing the effects of it, the first of which would be my voice dropping. That came in only a matter of probably two weeks. It was pretty dramatic. My voice dropped pretty low, actually, a lot lower than it is now.

But I also started building a little bit of muscle. My facial features started to become a little more rough and squarish. My hair and my eyebrows got thicker. I started growing a very small amount of facial hair. My shoulders got bigger and I became stronger and more physically fit. For the first time, really, I felt confident about myself.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow. At this point, you’re thinking this is something that’s working?

Ms. Cole:

Yes. I would say there was a bit of a honeymoon period even. About halfway through my sophomore year, I started expressing to my therapist that I wanted to get a double mastectomy, which at the time we called top surgery.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. What do you think of that euphemism? I’ve heard about that.

Ms. Cole:

It really downplays the real seriousness of this operation almost in a childlike way. It’s almost like it’s really being broken down to make it easier for a kid or somebody who’s young to digest it a little bit more easily.

Mr. Jekielek:

You are a kid going through all this. Trace to me to the point where you realized that something’s wrong.

Ms. Cole:

Before I got the surgery, by the time I was in my sophomore year, I really was not in my best shape. I was diagnosed with depression and social anxiety, and they started medicating my depression. I just continued to get worse.

I was also using a chest binder since my eighth grade year, after an incident of a boy at school who had assaulted me. I would wear this thing for, I’d say, about eight to 12 hours a day. I would be at school for eight hours. I would wear it whenever I was out of the house, whenever there were people over, or whenever I was working out outside or swimming.

I just got so sick of it. It wasn’t painful, but it was very uncomfortable. During the summer, it was especially suffocating and I wanted to be free of it. I fell into the delusion that I was actually a boy just living within a girl’s body. I wanted to look like the other boys my age. I had that trauma from being assaulted as well, and had a fear of it happening again.

Mr. Jekielek:

This might be a bit of a strange question, but did you really believe you were a boy, or that you could become a boy?

Ms. Cole:

Really, I’d say it was the former. It’s hard to explain because it doesn’t make sense, but it was almost a spiritual or religious belief. There were a lot of motivations behind getting my breasts removed, some of which I didn’t realize were there at the time. When I had been assaulted, this was while I was early in my transition, and I just thought of it as boys being boys, and I should just man up if I wanted to be one.

I was in a delicate situation anyway, because I knew that if I wanted to speak up and bring it up to a staff member or somebody in the office at school, more likely than not, the kid would have just received a weeklong suspension or something and come back and possibly do something worse. I didn’t want to deal with that.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you go through this surgery. What is supposed to happen after that in this progression?

Ms. Cole:

I believed that after the healing process was over, I would be happy. I would be happy about being closer to my true self as a real man and finally be able to go out shirtless and work out and swim without worrying. But that never happened. I never fully healed, and I’ve even had some complications pop up years afterward.

But after I woke up from the surgery, I felt pretty happy. It was an outpatient surgery, so I was sent home pretty much as soon as I was conscious and the meds had worn off. It was a major surgery and I had lost pretty much my entire range of motion in my upper body. I had to have my mom take a few weeks off of work and stay home to help me around the house and feed me.

After that period, though, once I had the stitches taken out and I had to start bathing again and wrap and unwrap the dressings, it started to take a turn for the worst. It was like a slap to the face.

Every night when I looked down or when I looked in the mirror, I would just see my wounded chest. Looking at myself, I felt disgusting. I felt like a freak. I hoped that one day it would be over and I would finally feel better, but I didn’t. It just kept getting worse. I kept justifying it in my head as just being part of the post-op process. Some people get depressed after they have a major surgery like this, but it never really improved.

Over time I started to realize that I missed having a more feminine form. I missed wearing makeup and doing my hair and wearing dresses and skirts and pink and things like that. Pretty, I guess you’d say, stereotypical, trivial stuff, but there were some things about being a woman that I just missed.

Over the course of my social transition, I learned that certain things are pretty restricted for boys and socialization, not only in terms of how you express yourself, but also even in just the way you interact and bond with other people. A lot of my relationships started to feel more superficial, and I couldn’t really bond with people of either sex as well.

Once the honeymoon period was over, I started to learn that I was taking on a role that I really wasn’t prepared for, and that I really wasn’t fit for, and that I didn’t want. It wasn’t until I had a class in psychology, though, that the realization had fully hit me that transition was my biggest mistake, actually.

In that class, I learned about child psychology and development and parenting and maternity. There was a particular lesson about a study on monkeys using either a cloth mother or a wire mother with an apparatus in the chest to simulate breastfeeding. One of the findings was that the ones who were able to cling to their mothers and feed from them and had that physical affection and that warmth, tended to perform better socially, cognitively, and emotionally.

They did tell me before the surgery that I would lose my ability to breastfeed, but this meant nothing to me at the time because I believed I was a boy, and that I was going to grow up into a man, and men don’t do things like that. But I also didn’t know how important it really was. I hadn’t really thought of how being a parent would look like for me even because I was just a kid.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re just a kid. How could you possibly know?

Ms. Cole:

They justified it by saying, “Oh, kids already know their gender by a certain age, so they know what’s best for themselves.”

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you think of that now?

Ms. Cole:

Any parent and anybody who has a younger sibling or a niece or a nephew, or knows even a little bit about child psychology, knows that this is not true, not one bit, and that children need to be protected from themselves. They need guidance. That was not what I was given at all.

Mr. Jekielek:

I get the sense you’re telling me that you think your parents did try to do the best they could, but they were misled. I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Ms. Cole:

They were very misled. They were even manipulated by our doctors.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I may, and you don’t have to respond, but there was a moment where you said you did get suicidal. What was it? Was it just the hopelessness of the whole situation? What was it that prompted that?

Ms. Cole:

I felt quite hopeless for a lot of reasons, with the changes in socialization, and with my friendships and relationships becoming less close and less satisfactory. There was a lot of stress placed onto me because I was living a lie, really. I had a fear of going to the male facilities. I did use the boys’ restrooms and locker rooms at school, but it was scary.

I was really terrified of eventually being found out and something terrible happening to me. I didn’t know what I would do. It’s not like I could have used the girls’ restrooms because then I would be making the girls uncomfortable.

There weren’t any accessible bathrooms that I could use that were available to students, so I just used the male restrooms. Another thing about the change, the social changes, was that I was still attracted to guys, but I was starting to look like one as well, and there’s really not very many males out there who are attracted to other males. Even if I wasn’t actually a guy, I looked like one. My dating pool was quite limited.

I mean as a teen, things like dating really shouldn’t be that important. But I was watching all my friends get into relationships and develop really close bonds with other people our age. I was just missing out on this completely and I felt like there was something wrong with me. I think really that was one of the biggest things feeling my depression, not necessarily being unable to get into a relationship, but just lack of intimacy and community in general.

Mr. Jekielek:

I would imagine people in the trans community or those pursuing the gender ideology or believe in this would say, “Everything you’ve just talked about is proof of our case. Look, society doesn’t understand us. We’re oppressed. This is wrong. We need to have tolerance.” Do you see what I mean? What do you think?

Ms. Cole:

Every person that I know my age who has transitioned has only become a lot worse off after they started. After socially transitioning, after starting on hormones or getting surgeries, they’ve become so much worse. A lot of them have developed issues with substance abuse, or their relationships with their families and friends have become completely destroyed. All of them, actually, have some sort of sexual or familial trauma.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is like from beforehand, is that what you mean?

Ms. Cole:

Yes. Then, I see it get worse after they start, so much worse.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is one of the things that I’ve understood from talking to people like Dr. Miriam Grossman on this show and others, that very commonly people that have this gender dysphoria diagnosis have other underlying conditions that are very important.

Ms. Cole:

Almost always.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. So, this is your experience with the people you know as well.

Ms. Cole:

They’re really quite vulnerable people, and they change completely. They become new people after they transition. It’s almost always a change for the worse. Even within these communities, they encourage others to cut off contact with their family over differences in opinions or feelings. A lot of them even get each other started on drinking or smoking or using psychedelics. It is encouraged.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s the whole community element. You discovered this community online, but then in the process you also found them in real life?

Ms. Cole:

Yes. It started online. In middle school, I didn’t know anybody else who was transitioning. I knew a lesbian or two, but it wasn’t until my sophomore year that I started noticing these other girls my age starting to identify as non-binary or transmasculine or as a trans boy. With each school year after that, more and more of them started popping up. It was always girls who had eating disorders or body image issues, or they were overweight, or they didn’t really have very many friends. I always noticed some sort of pattern.

Mr. Jekielek:

It just became much more of a thing over time.

Ms. Cole:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you think you’ve influenced any of them along the way?

Ms. Cole:

Yes. I had a few friends who transitioned after I did. I never pushed anybody into transitioning. But when you’re a kid, you are impressionable and you tend to copy the behaviors and sometimes even the presentation of the people around you.

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you make of that now that you’ve decided to detransition?

Ms. Cole:

I do feel a little bit of guilt, even if I never told them, “Hey, you should transition,” even if it was them making that choice. I still get this feeling like if it never happened, would they be like this right now? A lot of my former transgender friends, both online and from school, have cut ties with me after I’ve started speaking out about my experience.

Mr. Jekielek:

What was the moment where you realized that, okay, I’m going to go in the other direction? Because it sounds like there’s this progression to this point. Please tell me what you were thinking.

Ms. Cole:

After I finished that psychology class, a few weeks afterward was when it really started to hit me that I just couldn’t keep going on like this. I stopped taking my testosterone shots entirely, and I started growing out my hair and buying new clothes.

Mr. Jekielek:

You stopped, you just cut it off, the testosterone?

Ms. Cole:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

What was that like?

Ms. Cole:

It was horrific. I dropped 25 pounds in a matter of two months. I lost my appetite almost entirely, and I was having digestive issues alongside that. I was already experiencing some issues with my urinary tract about a year into testosterone, and going off of it made it so much worse, at least temporarily.

In terms of my physical health, I’ve been getting a lot better the longer that I’m off it. But when I went off it initially, the emotional adjustment and the psychological adjustment was very difficult.

Mr. Jekielek:

You have this letter of intent to sue out for some of the people that were involved, the medical professionals that were involved in the process of your transitioning. When you made this decision to detransition, did you alert any medical professionals? Were you looking for help there, or did you just say, “This is up to me. I’m on my own here.”

Ms. Cole:

I made the decision to go off testosterone completely on my own. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, and what the overall picture might be for my health and my fertility and how my life really would go from there. So, naturally, I sought the help of the people who helped me get into the situation in the first place, and there really wasn’t any help.

Mr. Jekielek:

What did they say?

Ms. Cole:

The first person that I reached out to was my endocrinologist. I requested some blood work. I told her specifically I no longer identify as transgender. I want the results back for a female my age. But when I got my results back, the guidelines for my hormone levels were showing up as the averages for a teenage boy my age. That was really the first thing that made me realize I’m not going to get any help with this.

I reached out to my therapist, my general specialist, and they had no clue what to do with me. Eventually, I reached out to my surgeon as well to report that I regretted my mastectomy and my transition as a whole, and that I was still experiencing some complications, some of which had popped up well after they should have. It’s to the point that every day I have to bandage up my chest.

He told me to keep doing that, but also to put Vaseline on my chest, which actually temporarily gave me a skin infection. That was the last straw for me. That was when I knew these people had no intent to help me.

Mr. Jekielek:

But you did find support somewhere.

Ms. Cole:

From my family. I lost a lot of friends through this process, but in the end I figured out who my real friends were, and I’ve managed to make some more outside of school.

Mr. Jekielek:

Given everything you’ve just told me, the decision to go public with this, that’s quite the decision.

Ms. Cole:

It’s not easy. Even when I started expressing my regret with transitioning and just bringing it up, I would get attacked on my personal social media by other transgender people, even by people who weren’t trans but call themselves allies. It got to the point that I just stopped speaking about it for a little bit, because I just couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle that kind of treatment.

These are people that I thought cared about me, that I shared a common experience with, and that I could bond with and that could understand me. But because I stopped, I guess they started seeing me as some sort of traitor.

Eventually, though, I realized how unfair this treatment was and that I was being lied to, not only by my doctors, but even my friends in the community. Around this time, I was also starting to speak with other people who have regretted or stopped their transitions. I learned that there’s a lot more. This experience of going through all the motions, thinking it’s the best thing ever, and eventually being hit with this wave of regret, and then eventually losing your friends and your community is so much more common than I thought.

But I was pretty lucky to make it to that point. Not everybody can, and not everybody has a voice. So, I took it upon myself to start speaking up because I don’t know who will.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t know how much you’ve been following the Twitter Files, the releases. There’s a lot of censorship of certain viewpoints, and there’s this ability through social media, and this was demonstrated and we’ve known in theory. But with these Twitter Files that really showed itself, that you can shape the perception of reality for a whole swath of society.

What you’re describing strikes me as one of these areas, where one viewpoint is dominant and celebrated and the only correct one, the only way you can really view things, and the other one is not supposed to exist.

Ms. Cole:

Yes, it’s ridiculed and laughed at even. It’s a joke.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’ve become somewhat of a face for the detransitioning movement, or detransitioners. How common is this? We don’t even really know. It’s hard to get information about this.

Ms. Cole:

We don’t know. We don’t have enough studies on this yet. There’s plenty of studies out there, but not without major flaws. The dropout rate of these studies, a lot of them are upwards of 20 per cent. They’re very skewed, and very biased in the criteria for reasons to detransition. They often cite societal reasons, like feeling pressured, or not having enough money to continue a full medical transition. But none of those people ever stopped identifying as trans, and most of them expressed regret.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re talking about studies where you’re trying to look at what is the regret rate, what is the likelihood that someone will be happy with their decisions. What is that?

Ms. Cole:

They’re studying people who still identify as trans, even if they’re not medically transitioning.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. Is this because there’s only one real answer that’s allowable? Is that how you understand it?

Ms. Cole:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. So, what to do in the face of this? What do you do? What’s your approach here?

Ms. Cole:

I just keep giving my testimony and bring light to what’s happening to children at the hands of negligent medical professionals, and now even schools. My hope in doing this was not only to give my own account, but also to encourage other people in the situation to give theirs. I’ve seen so many more people in this situation popping up almost every day on social media, and even some people who, like me, had transitioned medically as minors.

Mr. Jekielek:

In a number of countries in Europe, they’re approaching this whole question of transitioning as a solution, very differently than they do in the U.S. these days.

Ms. Cole:

They’re slowing down.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right.

Ms. Cole:

Almost a total halt in some countries.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. What do you make of the fact that the Tavistock clinic is being sued for something similar to what you’ve been describing?

Ms. Cole:

Yes. But in the U.S., it’s not slowing down anytime soon. I feel like that’s mostly because the U.S. is just more motivated by money and by political power.

Mr. Jekielek:

How does the money fit into this?

Ms. Cole:

The surgeries, I would say, are the most lucrative. The figures for the average cost for full medical transition, including hormonal treatments and surgeries, is around $300,000 for a single patient. It’s pretty lucrative.

Mr. Jekielek:

Basically you’re saying that there’s a financial incentive for hospitals or clinics to do this.

Ms. Cole:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

We mentioned your intent to sue. What is that? Please explain that to me. What is your plan here?

Ms. Cole:

I teamed up with the Center for American Liberty, with Harmeet Dhillon as my lawyer, to sue my surgeon, my gender specialist, and my endocrinologist, as well as Kaiser Permanente as a whole, and also the hospital that did it. Right now, we’re still in the 90-day period. We haven’t filed a lawsuit yet or gotten a response, but it’s coming pretty soon.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is it that they did that you think they did wrong?

Ms. Cole:

They withheld information from my parents and me. They didn’t give a fully comprehensive list of the side effects that blockers and testosterone and the surgery would give me. I also wasn’t capable of making that kind of decision at the age that I was. My parents did sign off on everything because they were required to, but they were scared into it. They were manipulated. Not only that, it’s caused me physical and emotional harm. Those are years that I will never get back. I don’t know if I’ll be able to carry a child to term, and I certainly won’t be able to feed them naturally.

Mr. Jekielek:

You described this situation in your school where as time went on, more and more girls are basically coming out as trans. There’s a lot of parents out there right now who are maybe seeing this happen to their child or the child of a family next door. What would you say to parents that are seeing this? What advice would you give them?

Ms. Cole:

You have to be strict, but loving. Really, you have to be as involved in their lives as you can and show them how much you love them without affirming their desire to become the opposite sex, or their belief that they actually are.

Some telltale signs of a kid wanting to or trying to socially transition would be that they’re changing their expression. If they’re a boy, they’re starting to wear makeup or to grow their hair out or wear clothes of the opposite sex. I’d say, for girls, it would be pretty similar, but instead it would be like haircuts or stopping wearing makeup or wearing different clothes, which is often pretty normal.

Kids, and especially teens, like to experiment with that, but it’s often in combination with a drop in their grade performance or attendance or who they associate with at school. Oftentimes they’ll have a friend who identifies as trans or non-binary, or even multiple friends, or entire groups of kids who have some transgender identity.

They might even start to withdraw from you. They might start getting secretive. They might start keeping things from you. They might not talk to you as often. They might be always out of the house or withdrawing, staying in their room, and always using social media. It’s important to monitor what your kid is looking at on social media, how long they’re looking at it, and who they might be interacting with.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re 18 now. Is that right?

Ms. Cole:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

It doesn’t feel like the advice of an 18-year-old. There’s probably a lot of young people in your situation out there. What do you say to them?

Ms. Cole:

People who want to transition or people who regret their transition?

Mr. Jekielek:

Great question. Let’s start with people who might be wondering about whether transitioning is the right thing for them.

Ms. Cole:

Yes. It’s really best to just wait until you’re an adult, and that might not necessarily mean reaching 18 to make a decision like that. Sometimes it might take until you’re 21, or you’re 25, or even much older to really determine whether this is something that might benefit you in the long run and make you feel better.

But it’s something that’s hard to admit as a kid. Your mind isn’t always in the right place. It’s harder to really introspect and figure out where certain desires, certain feelings might come from. Not only that, but there are a lot of things about transitioning socially and medically that people don’t really touch upon. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t realize would happen until it happened to me. Even if those things were disclosed to me, I feel like I still wouldn’t have really understood. That’s the case for a lot of things, really.

We bar people under the ages of 18, 21, 25, and so on from being able to drink or smoke cigarettes or buy marijuana or rent a car. I’ve been traveling a lot and sometimes I can’t even get a hotel room because I’m under the age of 21, and yet I still was able to get my breasts removed when I was 15, because I wanted to.

When you’re young, you don’t really realize the dangers of certain things such as this. It is a decision that impacts things like sexual function and your sexual relationships, as well as your ability to have kids. Until those are things that you really consider or have had experience with, it’s not something that you can really make such an important decision on. There’s men and women out there who don’t realize that they want to have children until they’re well into their 30s or 40s, or even well past the time that they can physically have children.

Mr. Jekielek:

What about for the prospective detransitioners who are thinking about it?

Ms. Cole:

I’m not going to encourage anybody to either transition or detransition. I went through both processes, and either way it was really painful and it’s not something that I would wish on anybody. But it gets so much better from here.

Those initial stages of stopping the hormones, stopping whatever medications you’re on, and having to physically and emotionally adjust are really tough. They can even be scary at times. The shame of admitting that you were wrong to your friends and your family members and your colleagues is hard to deal with. But it’s important to remember that admitting that you were wrong is not a symptom of being weak. It’s quite the opposite. It only gets so much better from there.

Mr. Jekielek:

Chloe Cole, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Cole:

It was a pleasure to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thank you all for joining Chloe Cole and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

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