Chloe Cole, a biological female, was only 12 years old when she told her parents that she wanted to transition to a boy. Six years later, after receiving cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy, she says she regrets her decision to begin her gender transition at such a young age.
“I’m biologically female, but at the age of 12, I expressed to my parents, my family that I wanted to transition to a boy,” Cole said in an interview with NTD News. “And just even after a few months of, you know, being referred to a therapist and getting a diagnosis for gender dysphoria, I was started on medicalization at just the age of 13. I started with puberty blockers and then, about a month later, I started on cross-sex hormones. And then eventually at 15, I got a double mastectomy.”
Cole said it was only shortly after the double mastectomy that she came to regret her decision. She stopped the transitioning process when she was 16.
It has been two years since the surgery, and Cole said she’s still having complications. She said the decision to begin and then stop hormone treatments “cold turkey” also caused problems.
“I had gotten some urinary tract issues from taking testosterone after about a year,” Cole said. “And by going off of it, and it got worse about tenfold, and I very quickly dropped weight, I lost my appetite and in a matter of only about two months, I dropped about 25 pounds give or take.”
Cole said she has started recovering over the course of her detransitioning process and has seen the return of her menstrual cycle. Still, she is unsure if any aspects of her gender transition may be permanent.
“I’m not quite sure about you know, my fertility status, whether I’ll be able to conceive a child or even safely carry, there’s just there’s a lot of unknowns, and I’m still experiencing complications,” she said.
Social Media Influenced Cole’s Transition Decision
Cole’s initial desire to transition came as an outgrowth of her “tomboy” personality as a child as well as body image issues she developed growing up.
“I had some body image issues, you know, partly because I was a tomboy. I was kind of on the more athletic side, and I didn’t really have—my chest wasn’t really developed, and I had a little bit more muscle in my body and, you know, I had bigger shoulders, I liked having my hair short and I often felt like there’s this standard that I didn’t really match up to. I felt like I never really matched up to other girls,” Cole said.
Compounding Cole’s troubles with fitting in was that she had autism spectrum disorder, making it difficult to socialize with her peers.
“I was introduced to this idea from a young age that from—from social media that maybe, maybe I wasn’t actually grown, maybe that I was actually boy,” Cole said. “And it was kind of like, it was like, it felt like there was a bit of hope.”
Powerful Interest Groups Promoting Gender Transitioning to Children, Activist Warns
Cole said her experience is not uncommon in teenagers who started gender transitioning.
“There’s so many cases of other people like me that I’ve met,” Cole said. “It’s like every week I come across a new person online who has an experience quite like mine, having gone through transition at a young age and then regretting it and experiencing complications later on.
Tamra Farah, a parental rights advocate concerned about children undergoing gender transitions, said this about powerful interest groups:
“Schools have adopted policies to make sexual orientation and gender identity protected classes, that’s been their kind of their goal, right,” Farah told NTD News. “And that’s where things have gone and school districts are orienting these policies around the pressure from—and people need to know this because this is the foundation of it—the orientation is around pressure from teachers unions, Departments of Education—state and federal, and very powerful non-government organizations that are funding various curricula in schools across this country. So these are the power brokers behind the curtain.”
Farah said some school boards have placed an emphasis on placing “SOGI” or “sexual orientation and gender identity” throughout their curriculums. Farah agreed with concerns that such emphasis on gender issues is confusing children at a stage in their development when structure and clearly defined rules and principles are critical.
Proponents of gender transitioning argue that beginning the process at a younger age will improve outcomes for transgender individuals.
The Trevor Project, an organization that advocates on behalf of LGBT youth and supports gender transitioning, has said “gender-affirming care has been shown to reduce suicide ideation and attempts in transgender individuals.” The organization has also said that puberty blockers “can provide youth more time to explore their gender identity without the development of unwanted physiological changes and may also serve as a precursor to gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT).”
The St. Louis Children’s Hospital has said the use of puberty blockers in early puberty “leads to better outcomes and prevents the lifelong difficulties that can result from living with undesired sex characteristics.”
Majority of Registered Voters Oppose Gender Identity Curriculums: Poll
While some proponents of gender transitioning support starting the process for children at a young age, Farah noted a September New York Times/Siena poll showed a majority of registered voters polled oppose even introducing children to sexual orientation and gender identity topics in public schools.
In the poll, 70 percent of registered voters said they either somewhat or strongly opposed public school teachers providing classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in elementary school; and 54 percent continued to oppose such classroom instructions in public middle school and high school grade levels.
“The best thing to do really is to wait,” Cole said. “I mean, when you’re young, it’s a lot more difficult to be making a decision like this. I just, I don’t really think that a kid can really consent they don’t really have the—don’t really have the mental faculties to be able to determine whether they can make such a big decision in their lives.”
