A children’s endocrinologist said in a 2020 documentary titled "Growing Up Trans" that this generation’s children are “the pioneers” of gender-affirming hormone therapy. ”They are going to be the ones to teach us,” Dr. Courtney Finlayson said.
But Chloe Cole doesn’t see herself as a pioneer. More like a child experimented on.
Cole was prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone just after her first menstrual cycle at 13 years old. But before beginning her transitioning, she said she was like many middle schoolers, uncomfortable in her changing body and detesting the attention she was getting for it.
She recounted a happy childhood as the youngest of five kids, one filled with princesses and dress-up. “I was what a lot of people would call very stereotypically girly,” she told the Deseret News. “My entire closet was chock full of bright colors, bright pinks, especially sparkles. My dad often tells me that at that time, I wouldn’t even leave the house without wearing sparkles or bright pink.”
When she entered mid-childhood, she, like many girls, became a tomboy. So when puberty inevitably began, “I was made to feel like it was a burden, rather than something to embrace. And I had hoped that in running away from my femininity and not trying to be pretty and trying to shrink, that I could escape those things somehow.”
Insecurities fueled by bullying caused Cole to look at herself in the mirror and “pick apart everything.”
“The older I got, the more I felt I would never be worthy enough as a girl. I was worried that I wasn’t growing up or becoming pretty fast enough, like other girls, and I just had this huge sense of shame,” she said, “And even though I wanted to feel beautiful, even though I wanted to indulge in things like makeup and fashion, it was something that I just thought I would never be good enough for. And so, in a very self-hating way, I abstained from what I wanted.”
Now 21, Cole is taking her childhood medical professionals to court, arguing that what happened to her as a child didn’t end when she grew out of adolescence — it shaped her adulthood, driving her to advocacy to stop other children from experiencing what she did.
Putting trust in the wrong hands
At the time, communicating her feelings to her parents seemed an impossible feat, and it took a toll on her mental health.
She began therapy at 13, after telling her parents her interest in becoming transgender — a term she was familiarized with online after getting her first cellphone. Specifically, she read frequently about “the euphoria of discovering your true self,” related to transitioning.
Looking back, Cole remembers as a young girl being enamored by the colorful flags and artwork she discovered in the tight-knit community, where people were “glorifying” the scars they had received from their surgeries to further their transition. “They had basically all the same struggles I did growing up, with being isolated, many of them being bullied, a lot of them being not very typical people and looking for a box to fit into,” Cole said.
She and her parents placed their full trust in her medical team of psychologists, doctors and eventually surgeons in California, where she was raised. Visiting the hospital became so routine, she said, the smell of rubbing alcohol became a familiar and comforting scent.
“Everything was pointing my parents toward getting intervention as early as possible, but what they thought medical help meant was just that I would be counseled through these feelings, not pushed down the medical route.”
At 16, Cole underwent a double mastectomy, a procedure she had been told would be the final major step in addressing her gender dysphoria. What she called “the biggest lie” the medical community told her and her parents was that undergoing top surgery, taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatment, would be both suicide- and depression-alleviating.
But it ended up doing neither. For her, those changes did not ease her internal distress and seemed based solely on cosmetic outcomes, she said.
She told the Deseret News that the surgery only worsened her mental health.
“Immediately after surgery was when I could really think of that feeling of grief surfacing for the first time. But I didn’t know for such a long time what to even call it, because the transition and grief and regret were not even spoken about in the consultations.”
The young teen’s confusion was compounded by the fact that others — including her doctors and members of her online community — had led her to believe it would be the best time of her life.
“At first I was mistaken that I was happy and that it made me whole and that I felt more like a man, but that’s really only because I was going through exactly what I was told would make me happy,” she said. “My doctors were basically just going by the playbook, and I was being celebrated more than I ever had been before in my life.”
But during her high school psychology class, less than a year post-surgery, Cole realized maybe she wanted to be a mother someday and that she would now be unable to breastfeed her future children naturally.
“There were a few lessons that involved breastfeeding and the importance of motherhood and child rearing,” she said. “I was reading through this lesson, and I looked down at my chest,” picturing the scars underneath her shirt, thinking of “what could have been. In another world I could have had a child at my breast, and I could have nourished them. ... I felt like such a monster that I felt compelled to take that option away from them. And for years, I hated myself.”
Cole said detransitioning was profoundly disorienting, involving not only personal loss but a full ideological unraveling. She said it also took years to realize she wasn’t to blame.
Speaking out
Through her family and faith, Cole was able to see the light at the end of a dark and confusing tunnel. She is now an advocate in one of today’s most controversial social issues.
She’s been outspoken about her experience since the beginning of her detransition. For her, it’s about preventing what happened to her from happening to more children, and making sure the other side of the transgenderism experience is being told.
“Once a child has gone through this, there is no going back, and no amount of money will ever justify any of it, or heal things.”
— Chloe Cole
“The best possible outcome for children who are going through this confusion is to be treated and loved the same as every other child — the way that God has beautifully created them,” she said, “And that’s not to say that the feelings that these children are experiencing aren’t real. They’re very real, but it’s not the consequence of them having perfectly healthy bodies that they’re unhappy with. For a lot of them, it does come down to normal pubertal distress that is exacerbated by these communities that they’re in online.”
She continued, “A lot of these children also have commonalities like autism, depression, other mental health issues that the medical community has for so long been pushing aside in favor of looking at every issue in their life as related to their sex, when really we should be looking at where these feelings really come from.”
On Nov. 9, 2022, soon after turning 18, Cole filed an intent to sue in California Superior Court against the medical professionals who treated her from ages 13 to 17. She told the Deseret News she still struggles with “complete mistrust” in the medical system, even avoiding a doctor’s appointment for five years post-detransition.
“I think the primary reason why any hospital has, or any doctor has done this in the first place, is ideological,” Cole said. “And these doctors, what they’re being told is that by affirming them (children), whether it be by using their preferred name or pronouns or referring to them as the opposite sex, you are helping them to mitigate suicide and live their life as the happiest and healthiest that they can.”
However, “They know, as adults, and as medical professionals, that these are immature kids who are truly not capable of consent or fully understanding adult decisions. This is something I firmly believe to be an adult decision, because it basically governs the rest of your development. ... You can’t just stop a natural bodily process that we’re supposed to go through in order to move into adulthood, psychologically, socially, emotionally and physically, and expect there to not be any consequences.”
Last month, the first major medical malpractice verdict in a case involving a minor who underwent gender reassignment surgery was reached, with the court finding the medical professionals responsible for leaving detransitioner Fox Varian “disfigured for life.”
The civil suit in Westchester County Supreme Court in White Plains, New York, where Varian was awarded $2 million from her childhood psychologist and plastic surgeon, is one of nearly 30 detransitioner lawsuits nationwide, including Cole’s.
While almost half of the states in the U.S. have laws prohibiting these procedures on minors and the federal government opposes them, Cole thinks that legal action will ultimately cause the medical community to discontinue the practice nationwide.
“Everything was pointing my parents toward getting intervention as early as possible, but what they thought medical help meant was just that I would be counseled through these feelings, not pushed down the medical route.”
— Chloe Cole
Cole’s lawsuit is against “the clinic that did my surgery, my surgeon, the endocrinologist who gave me the castration drugs and the psychologist who referred me through the surgical process, because I believe that they’re all liable for the damage that they have wrought upon my body, that it was fraud, it was malpractice, and I deserve to be compensated for it.”
“Unfortunately, in any case, once a child has gone through this, there is no going back, and no amount of money will ever justify any of it, or heal things. Part of my motivation in doing this is to take down this industry, to scare my doctors and any other doctor in America, for that matter, from ever even thinking about doing this to a child ever again.”