Name: Chloe Cole Breaks Down Major HHS Shift on Gender Medicine—and Why It Matters
Uploaded: 2026-02-02T22:46:39.000Z
Description: 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.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] 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 NTD.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

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 some years gender-affirming care, and HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. has actually spoken about this in no uncertain terms. I will play you a video clip, and I want 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 oath by endangering the very lives that they are sworn to safeguard. The American Medical Association and 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 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 it. 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 a number, 300,000. What does that refer to exactly? Can you lay that out for me?

I think he’s referring to the amount of children between the ages of 13 to 17 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 it is that we came to be sitting here today?

I represent a community of young people known as detransitioners 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.

I went through the process when I was between the ages of 12 and 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 were other kids out there.

I’d seen the other kids who were in the hospital system, some of whom 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-growing group of people—who are in my exact situation, many of whom 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 am 21-years-old.

So how is it that it came to your mind that this might be a good idea? And I mean, let’s tackle that first, and then I have a whole bunch of other questions.

I suppose I’ve always been somewhere between being a stereotypical tomboy and girly girl really early in my childhood. My dad once told me there was a point in time when I wouldn’t even like to leave the house if I wasn’t wearing a sparkly tutu or really bright colors or hearts or sparkles. But there was also 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 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 any of my female role models.

So I didn’t know how to properly navigate these feelings around my changing body and my developing breasts, and also the attention that I was getting for that at a very early age. I just 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 before my 12th birthday. And I very quickly discovered this community of people who were very creative, who were very artistic, who thought outside the box, who shared a lot of my interests in video games and 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.

It was primarily young women my age who also thought that they were tomboys until one day they decided that they actually were boys. 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 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 is often neglected or abused, or individuals may have a poor relationship with either one of their parental figures. Sexual trauma is a significant issue, and there are often comorbidities of autism, 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. Many people who are struggling or who are different in any way and 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. There’s also this festering ideology around it. 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.

There are ideas like that sex and gender exist on a spectrum, that somehow it is fluid, but also that transgender people are who they claim to be, and this is something that will never go away. That’s exactly why the testimonies of people like me, who come out of it and speak to the truth, are so threatening to them because it completely dismantles their ideology. That is why they go so hard after conservatives and 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 victims of this.

I remember there’s this term TERF, right? That’s for people who tend to be on the Left, like feminists, who don’t agree with gender ideology. There’s a particular slur.

Right, TERF stands for, trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Even though many of the people to whom they apply the term are not in any way radical, or feminists, or exclusionary towards 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.

Going back to the contagion part, I remember Abigail Shrier looked at this phenomenon where you would have these clusters of young women, girls, who would suddenly all become trans, right, altogether. And that was like, hey, wait a second. You know, the people who were not in any way thinking about this. I mean, your own experience, right? Do you feel like you fell into this social contagion, or how did that work?

Absolutely. 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 affiliated more with being a woman.

But in recent years, and really the past decade, we’ve seen a huge explosion in women, 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 body dysmorphia, plastic surgery, self-harm, and cutting. 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, and 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?

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 resources 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 processes. 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, a 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 the Hippocratic Oath with the doctors. That’s what I’m thinking about. What do you make of that?

I’ll often have activists say, 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 to 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 into believing that I was a young man, that this was 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, 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, and 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 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. All my older siblings were having babies of their own at this point, and I was the youngest child, so I never had the experience of babysitting or anything, or seeing the beauty of innocence from an outside perspective.

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 would be able to have any, still, to this day. But it was my burgeoning maternal instincts 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?

The entire thing is a lie; nobody knows they’re transgender because there’s no such thing as being transgender. You are the way that you were born, and there are 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 regrets 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 these new HHS rules, okay? So what’s in there that’s of interest? Do you want to comment a little bit?

So there are 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. 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 breast binders. So for those of you in the audience who are not familiar with what breast binders are, they’re these medical devices that 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 creates issues with breathing or causes something that’s happened to me and a lot of my friends: the concaving of the rib cage. This is more prominent in people who are already developing or who have larger breasts, and there are 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 thus require care for it, which for them means these mutilative and castrating procedures.

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 males, multiple sclerosis is a known complication.

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