The ability of the transgender craze to destroy a life was laid before Congress Thursday as 19-year-old Chloe Cole told the story of her transitioning nightmare.
“I used to believe that I was born in the wrong body and the adults in my life, whom I trusted, affirmed my belief and this caused me lifelong, irreversible harm,” she said.
“I speak to you today as a victim of one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of the United States of America. I speak to you in the hope that you will have the courage to bring the scandal to an end, and ensure that other vulnerable teenagers, children and young adults don’t go through what I went through,” she said during a House hearing.
“My childhood was ruined,” she said, adding, “This needs to stop. You alone can stop it. Enough children have already been victimized by this barbaric pseudoscience. Please let me be your final warning,” she said.
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She said that at age the age of 12, unsure about the changes taking place as she underwent puberty, she told her parents she was transgender. They sought the help of experts, she said.
“But this proved to be a mistake. It immediately set our entire family down a path of ideologically motivated deceit and coercion. The gender specialist I was taken to see told my parents that I need to be put on puberty-blocking drugs right away,” she said.
“They asked my parents a simple question: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son?” she said, adding that her family “all became victims of so-called gender-affirming care.”
She said the testosterone injections she started getting at 13 “caused permanent changes in my body, my voice will forever be deeper, my jawline sharper, my nose longer, my bone structure permanently masculinized, my Adam’s apple more prominent, my fertility unknown.”
“I look in the mirror sometimes, and I feel like a monster. I had a double mastectomy at 15. They tested my amputated breasts for cancer. That was cancer-free, of course, I was perfectly healthy,” she said.
“After my breasts were taken away from me, the tissue was incinerated. Before I was able to legally drive, I had a huge part of my future womanhood taken from me,” she said.
She said she struggles with what was done to her body.
“I will never be able to breastfeed. I struggle to look at myself in the mirror at times. I still struggle to this day with sexual dysfunction. And I have massive scars across my chest and the skin grafts that they used, that they took off my nipples, are weeping fluid today, and they’re grafted into a more masculine positioning, they said.
“After surgery, my grades in school plummeted. Everything that I went through did nothing to address the underlying mental health issues that I had, and my doctors with their theories on gender thought that all my problems would go away as soon as I was surgically transformed into something that vaguely resembled a boy,” she said.
“Their theories were wrong. The drugs and surgeries changed my body, but they did not and could not change the basic reality that I am, and forever will be, a female.
“When my specialists first told my parents they could have a dead daughter or a live transgender son, I wasn’t suicidal. I was a happy child who struggled because she was different. However at 16, after my surgery, I did become suicidal,” she said.
Her conclusion? “We need to stop telling 12-year-olds that they were born wrong, that they are right to reject their own bodies and feel uncomfortable with their own skin.
“We need to stop telling children that puberty is an option, that they can choose what kind of puberty they will go through, just like they can choose what clothes to wear or what music to listen to. Puberty is a rite of passage to adulthood, not a disease to be mitigated,” she said.
Fox News noted that Cole later responded to comments from Myriam Reynolds, a mother who supported gender transitions.
“I understood that Mrs. Reynolds is scared for her child. And I just want to set the record straight that I don’t hate her, I don’t think anybody in this room hates her. In fact, I see my own mother and my own father in her,” Cole said as she began to cry.
“And that clearly, she really loves her child, and she’s been doing the best with what she’s been given. And unfortunately, it’s not much. And for that, I’m sorry. I mean I think every parent deserves the utmost grace and guidance with how to help their child,” she said.
“That being said, I don’t wish for a child to have [the] same result as I did. I don’t wish for anybody to regret transition and de-transition, because it’s incredibly difficult. It comes with its own difficulties, and it’s not easy. And I hope that her child gets to have a happy and fulfilling adulthood,” she said.
As noted by the New York Post, Cole’s testimony is counter to the Biden administration’s push for what it calls gender-affirming care.
Transgender and Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine has claimed that there “is no argument among medical professionals … about the value and the importance” of the procedures.
“Adolescence is hard and puberty is hard,” Levine said this month. “What if you’re going through the wrong puberty?”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
