Social Contagion and Vulnerability

At age 12, Chloe Cole began identifying as male and started socially transitioning. Soon after, she was put on puberty blockers. Testosterone injections followed at age 13, and she underwent a double mastectomy at 15.

Shortly after the surgery, she realized that it had all been a terrible mistake: “I didn’t believe that I was a boy ... until that idea was put in my head.”

When she decided to detransition, the community that once eagerly encouraged her to transition into a boy treated her like she was “subhuman,” she says.

“The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them,” she says.

Now she has become one of the most vocal critics of what’s been dubbed “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Under the Trump administration, several measures have been put in place to end the medical transitioning of minors: In January, President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed a new rule that prohibits hospitals that perform “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors from participation in Medicare and Medicaid Programs. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently spoke out against such procedures for minors and described them as medical malpractice.

And days ago, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that could imprison health care providers for providing these procedures to minors.

Cole, who is 21 years old today, supports such measures to put an end to medical transitioning of minors, but she’s convinced that this is not enough: “This doesn’t end with bans. We have to go all out and hold everybody who was involved accountable.”

And that’s what she’s doing: Cole filed a high-profile lawsuit in California against her healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, as well as her surgeon, endocrinologist, and the psychologist who referred her to surgery, alleging medical negligence, lack of informed consent, and fraud in placing her on puberty blockers, testosterone, and performing a double mastectomy.

Her legal team, among them Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty, has added punitive damages claims, presenting her case as a test of whether “gender-affirming” treatment for minors will be treated as malpractice in U.S. courts.

“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,” she said, adding, “We have to go after the manufacturers or the drugs of the medical devices that they are giving to children.”

Since 2022, Chloe has testified before multiple state legislatures. She also testified in the 2023 U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing titled “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.”

“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,” she said.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.