Chloe Cole: ‘I was told transitioning would save me. It destroyed my life’
The 19-year-old who felt pressured into surgery wants to be a girl again – and wants Congress to stop doctors dictating change
ByPeter Stanford27 August 2023 • 3:00pm
Chloe Cole is now a household name in America, after sharing her cautionary tale with the US Congress
Chloe Cole remembers the exact moment she knew she wanted to detransition. The 19-year-old from California’s Central Valley had undergone “top” surgery (a full or partial mastectomy) in her mid-teens to transition from female to male and returned to high school as Leo. Then, in 2021, as part of her psychology module, she found herself learning about family and parenting.
“It came as a huge wake-up call to me,” says Cole. “As I listened, I realised that I had a maternal instinct, that one day I’d like to have kids of my own, but that the effects of being prescribed
puberty blockers and testosterone during my transition might mean I couldn’t.”
With hindsight, she agrees it is odd that it hadn’t dawned on her before, but she was only 15 at the time of her surgery and having children one day or being able to breastfeed them really wasn’t the first thing on her mind. “But sitting in that class, it hurt me really deeply to realise how a part of me had been taken away.”
The doctors, who she now says “railroaded” her into surgery, had assured her
transitioning would make her happier. “In that moment in the psychology class, I knew that I was losing more and more of myself. It shattered my heart into a million pieces.”
We are meeting via Zoom with Cole – dressed in pink, her long, dark hair hanging loose to frame her face, her dark eyes compelling – now a household name in America, after sharing her cautionary tale with the US Congress as part of a hearing about “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children” last month.
It was her latest and most significant appearance on a public platform, but politicians have been courting her for months. Some – mostly Republicans –
in several state legislatures have introduced no fewer than 66 bills – some known as “Chloe’s Law” – that ban the sort of “gender-affirming” treatment she underwent being given to anyone under 18, and bring in other curbs on trans rights.
Fuelling their legislative efforts are figures from the respected Williams Institute at UCLA that show
the number of 13- to 17-year-olds in America identifying as transgender doubled to 1.4 per cent between 2017 and 2020.
One in five transgender people in the US is now in this teenage age-group, though in the population at large they make up 0.5 per cent, a figure that has remained steady over the same period. (In the UK, the most recent equivalent official figures, from 2019, show 0.05 per cent – or 1 in 2,000 – of 13- to 17-year-olds identifying as transgender.)
Estimates for those who, like Cole, then go on to detransition back to their original biological sex range between 2 and 13 per cent of the transgender population, according to The New York Times. The wide gap between the two reveals quite
what a hot potato this issue has become in the States – as in the UK.
Does Cole worry that sharing so publicly the intimate details of her story of detransitioning means being exploited by those on both sides in
America’s culture wars?
“At its core, the issue that I am focusing on is totally apolitical,” she replies. “It is something that should concern everybody, regardless of party lines because it is tearing kids apart from their families, destroying their lives, and infecting institutions from health care to education.”
On the accusation that she is caught up in the culture war clashes dividing America, she is firm in her denial. “It is much bigger than that. That is a very trivial way of putting it.”
For a small town-girl from rural California, standing up to give evidence before the nation’s lawmakers was, she concedes, nerve-wracking. “But I was excited to give my testimony up there and answer everybody’s questions. When I go back to the footage, you can see me bouncing in my chair. I was so pumped.”
It wasn’t quite the answer I was expecting and reminds me that, for all her polish as a speaker, she is still just 19. It is early morning in her austere bedroom in the family home in California. She only got back late last night from addressing a school board in the southern part of the state.
Yet she is full of energy and accusation – or, if you prefer, pumped. Her campaign, she says, is to save others from going through “Nazi-era experiments” carried out on her body by doctors. She is currently pursuing them through the courts.
“I am not opposed to people transitioning,” she makes clear at the outset, “but 18 would be a good marker for the start of the process. With the medical aspect, those under 25 are not fit to take on something like this. It affects every area of your life – social, family, sexual, reproductive.”
As she knows all too well. Chloe Cole grew up between Modesto and Stockton as the youngest of five siblings. Both her mother and father had two children from their previous relationships. “There is a significant age gap of about eight years between me and my two brothers and two sisters, so it was lonely.”
It was a loving home, she says, but also a distanced one. “I wasn’t super close to my parents. I must have had some sort of attachment issue. I started at five or six to reject physical affection.”
At elementary school, she struggled to make friends and was bullied. She was subsequently diagnosed with ADHD. “And I had symptoms of autism, but every time my mom and dad tried to get an assessment, they were told, ‘oh no, she’s too smart, too intelligent, too well spoken for her age for us to suspect she is on the spectrum’.”
Her distrust of the medical professionals, it becomes clear, runs deep. She is a strong supporter of the campaign Do No Harm, which accuses doctors of breaking the Hippocratic Oath in cases such as hers.
For her, puberty came early. “It was a really difficult time for me to deal with all of this change.” At this point she began to spend more and more time alone on the internet following social media posts, observing but never joining in.
“What I saw was that I was growing up in the age of thick, curvy, bottom-heavy girls and I felt I could never meet that ideal. I could never be a good woman.” Previously a “super-feminine kid”, as a result she started wearing “cargo shorts, more boyish muted, toned-down colours, and cut my hair short”.
She also began to read online about LGBT people, and accounts of those who had changed gender. “At that stage, I was around 12 or 13 and wondering what my role in the world would be, what I’d be like as an adult. All these new-found words appealed. I didn’t always act 100 per cent as was expected of a girl. I decided that I was going to be a boy. It was what made the most sense.”
She told her parents by writing them a letter. How did they take it? “Pretty well, but they were also very nervous. They had no idea what to do.”
Their choice, as set out in the literature they found online, was between “affirmation” or “watch and wait”. With the benefit of hindsight, Cole wishes they had chosen the latter course, but instead they sought out medical help – though she places no blame on them.
She was sent to a therapist, “but the moment that gender was mentioned, the doctors were going all out on that. They knew I had a history of mental health struggles and a learning disorder, but they said these had nothing to do with this. My distress was coming from my body, they said, from my gender dysphoria.”
Things thereafter moved very quickly: puberty blockers at 13 that put her in a state of menopause – “hot flushes and body itching and aching”; and then testosterone injections that caused an “uncomfortable and difficult” increase in libido.
Next her parents were told that upper body surgery – a double mastectomy – was recommended. The doctors framed the choice as between having “a dead daughter or a living son”. Reluctantly the Coles gave their consent.
Their daughter was pleased at the time. “I was the one pushing for it,” says Cole. “It was the only option I thought I had, based on what my medical advisers told me about treating gender dysphoria. In the trans community there is this mantra that sometimes people can have a brain of the opposite sex. I really clung very tightly to that belief because for me it explained why I felt the way I was feeling. I wasn’t like the other girls at school.”
The recovery from major surgery was slow and painful, but at first life as a boy – she had started a new school – was positive. “I thought I looked awesome – fit, healthy, like a boy of my age. I felt I had more control over how I looked. It was super exciting.”
But doubts set in almost immediately. “For the longest time it was hard to admit to myself that I could have been wrong but I also missed looking like a girl, having long hair, being able to wear dresses and skirts and stuff.”
A few girls had crushes on Leo – “but I had no interest in them and I was still attracted to guys, but they didn’t look at me in case people thought they were gay. I had no chance to explore romantic relationships like my peers were. It made me feel once again there was something wrong with me.”
It was, she recalls, a downward spiral, during which she signed up for the psychology class. Her determination in its wake to detransition did little initially to make things better. “I spent a lot of time in bed, unable to get up, crying silently. I didn’t know what life would look like from there and who I would be, but I just knew I couldn’t take any more testosterone shots.”
What has followed these past two years has an arduous journey of highs and lows. The physical complications are with her every day, she says. “I’ve had issues with urinary tract infections since I started on testosterone, blood, blood clots and even bits of tissue in my urine.”
Her cycles are “fairly irregular” and “unusually light”. “For a woman that sounds like a blessing but it can be indicative of a larger problem and that scares me.”
She clings to the hope that she might be able to get pregnant and have a baby, “but I don’t know if I will be able to safely carry a child to term, or if there will be a risk of birth defects”.
In making her case for all medical interventions to be halted until the age of 18, Cole has shown herself utterly unafraid to answer unprompted questions that people may have but are too shy to ask. “What has been inflicted on my body has affected me sexually. I am experiencing sexual dysfunction in several forms and that’s deeply painful to me because now I am an adult woman, I’m not a girl anymore, and that is a huge part of being an adult.”
She doesn’t know, she says in a matter-of-fact way, if she will ever be able to experience “the full spectrum of sexual pleasure”. But what intrudes most on her life, on a daily basis, relates to the skin grafts she had after her mastectomy.
“In the summer of last year the grafts began to weep this clear fluid that gets on my clothing and my bedding. I wear bandages on my chest again, something I stopped doing two months after my surgery.”
She made a phone appointment with the surgeon who removed her breasts. “I expected him to know what was going on, but he was nonchalant throughout the call. His suggestion to me was to put Vaseline on the wound to keep it moist, but it gave me a skin infection and the grafts now weep twice the amount of fluid.”
If she is even-toned, verging on emotionally distanced in telling her own extraordinary story, Cole’s anger boils up when she talks about her doctors. When she challenged them on the physical trauma of detransitioning (not a word they will use, she points out), they told her it was “just another part of your gender journey”.
“I shot that down. This is my rejection of that ideology.”
If she sounds confrontational, then she is, driven on by the realisation that, “I will never know what life could have been like if I had just been allowed to be a kid. I am so incredibly angry that any adult feels they have a right to do this to a kid. It is never, ever appropriate for a child to go under what I went under. No child can consent to anything like this.”
But her parents did? “Under duress. They were told it was going to be a net benefit for me, that it was going to save my life. It destroyed my life.”
What, though, of the other trans people who are on the record as saying surgery saved theirs? “I’ve met a few trans gender adults, who are older and well-adjusted. I attribute that to the fact that they transitioned after extensive psychological evaluation, and after being given the full picture of how this may affect them in terms of side effects and complications.”
They were also, she adds, “mostly past the age of 25, which is a marker as for when most people’s brains are fully developed and when you have a decent amount of experience in life. They were allowed to grow up, to develop, and could then make a decision to transition. But I’ve never yet met someone who transitioned as a child who isn’t in a horrible situation.”
It is the sort of anecdotal remark that will infuriate those who attack her on social media. If their slurs on her have any impact, she is very good at not showing it. “When I first detransitioned and started talking about my regrets, it was awful. It was the trenches. I stopped talking for a while, but it prepared me for what has come since.”
Nowadays, when the barrage comes after each public appearance and it is “the same arguments over and over again”, her response is “to laugh my butt off. I often have people saying I’m not real, that I am some kind of cyber operative, that the length of my arms prove I am a biological male. It’s all crazy stuff and anyway I have so many more people who support me for what I say.”
Some of those admirers are suggesting that Cole could have a career as a politician ahead of her. She shakes her head. “I feel like it would be monotonous. I’d rather be an activist and choose my issues – like family and children.”
If a decade ago, Cole was wondering how her life would turn out, though still only 19 she is now having a glimpse of what one sort of fulfilment could look like. But what pain to endure to get there. When I say it out loud to her, she shrugs it off. With an issue where every word you use takes you into a minefield, she is determinedly unfazed.
“I never really have moments when I question why I am doing it. Or when I ask, should I stop doing it. I do it because it matters. Many people out there need to hear it to understand just how serious this issue is.”
www.telegraph.co.uk
