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Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. We shouldn't glorify mental disorders.

Instead of encouraging people to change their entire bodies, let's find ways to help them accept who they are in the bodies they were born into.

By: Chloe Cole

Published: July 28, 2023

On Thursday, her 19th birthday, Chloe Cole testified to Congress with a “final warning” that medical treatments to change the gender of confused children is horrific. Cole, who was given surgery as a teenager to become male and soon regretted it, said what she needed most was therapy, not a scalpel. Here is what she told lawmakers:

My name is Chloe Cole and I am a de-transitioner.

Another way to put that would be: 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. 

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. 

Deceit & coercion 

At the age of 12, I began to experience what my medical team would later diagnose as gender dysphoria.

I was well into an early puberty, and I was very uncomfortable with the changes that were happening to my body. I was intimidated by male attention. 

And when I told my parents that I felt like a boy, in retrospect, all I meant was that I hated puberty, that I wanted this newfound sexual tension to go away.

I looked up to my brothers a little bit more than I did to my sisters. 

I came out as transgender in a letter I sent on the dining room table.

My parents were immediately concerned.

They felt like they needed to get outside help from medical professionals. 

But this proved to be a mistake.

It immediately set our entire family down a path of ideologically motivated deceit and coercion.

The general specialist I was taken to see told my parents that I needed to be put on puberty-blocking drugs right away. 

They asked my parents a simple question: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son? 

The choice was enough for my parents to let their guard down, and in retrospect, I can’t blame them.

This is the moment that we all became victims of so-called gender-affirming care.

I was fast-tracked onto puberty blockers and then testosterone. 

The resulting menopausal-like hot flashes made focusing on school impossible.

I still get joint pains and weird pops in my back.

But they were far worse when I was on the blockers. 

Forever changed 

A month later, when I was 13, I had my first testosterone injection.

It has 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.

There is nothing wrong with my still-developing body, or my breasts other than that, as an insecure teenage girl, I felt awkward about it.

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.

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 of 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 that all my problems would go away as soon as I was surgically transformed into something that vaguely resembled a boy — 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. 

Depths of despair 

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.

I’m doing better now, but my parents almost got the dead daughter promised to them by my doctors.

My doctor had almost created the very nightmare they said they were trying to avoid. 

So what message do I want to bring to American teenagers and their families?

I didn’t need to be lied to.

I needed compassion.

I needed to be loved. 

I needed to be given therapy that helped me work through my issues, not affirmed my delusion that by transforming into a boy, it would solve all my problems. 

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. 

Pseudoscience 

Puberty is a rite of passage to adulthood, not a disease to be mitigated.

Today, I should be at home with my family celebrating my 19th birthday.

Instead, I’m making a desperate plea to my elected representatives.

Learn the lessons from other medical scandals, like the opioid crisis. 

Recognize that doctors are human, too, and sometimes they are wrong. 

My childhood was ruined along with thousands of de-transitioners that I know through our networks.

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. 

Thank you.

Might as well call her a murtad and kufr.

"The medical industry mutilated me, maybe don't mutilate other kids," shouldn't require bravery or renouncing an ideology.

Reminder: A minor under the age of 18 is too young to agree to a cellphone contract. 🤦‍♀️

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teenaged girls deserve sexual innocence

i’m so tired of female children’s existence being obsessively tied to their value as sex objects.

girls deserve the right to be innocent.

they deserve the right to not know how to give a guy a blowjob or the ins and outs of bdsm by the time they hit 14.

they deserve the right to think love and sex is pure and good before some leering 40-year-old man spoils it by catcalling them at age 16 or younger.

they deserve the right to not know about half the degrading, abusive, horrific stuff the internet pushes in their faces by the time they’re 10 and allowed on the computer unsupervised for the first time.

they deserve the right to feel disgusted by sex instead of being pressured into accepting it as fun, cool, and desirable when they’re barely starting puberty.

they deserve the right to feel disgusted by sex when they’re in the throes of puberty, even—instead of feeling shamed, childish, and alone.

let girls be sexually innocent. don’t force them into sexualized clothing. don’t force them into high heels. don’t force them into experimenting with makeup. don’t force the tools of womanhood onto children.

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"Men want objects, women want people"

So well said

is it time for frank cho and milo manara to die or what

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The sheer irony

Tries to make a point about women being subdued

Proceeds to subdue women

Pink Prison, a comic I did for my color theory class this semester! we had to pick a color, research it, and do a piece related to it somehow. i chose pink :)

#terfs do touch #terfs do interact #terfs please interact #pro terf #terf friendly #radfem

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I hope u like my radfem meme

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Source on twitter

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Aww 🥰 love that for us

I HATE that so many people who reblog my posts about veganism are radfemms or terfs. Honestly why

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tale as old as time

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Was going thru her insta after seeing her most recent post and I love her message here, she says it so well 😍 you should read the whole thing, but I highlighted the point 4 ya

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Stop erasing women. You take everything from us and you want to even take away the word "women" when we talk about our stolen rights? You want to silence us for saying "uterus"? Do you really think you're helping? Do you think this is the time and the place?

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in 10 years, people are gonna look back at this depp-heard trial, realize how awful the misogyny surrounding it was, and say, “we behaved horribly.” yeah, leave me and others out of that ‘we’, because a bunch of us have been warning about how awful the disinformation is and how harmful it is for survivors to see. but ofc, any reasonable takes are drowned out by ridiculous things like a viral tweet of amber blowing her nose which has been framed as her ‘snorting coke in court’. you people have been behaving like demons and i can’t wait for your asses to realize how stupid some of you acted. 

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good evening. trans lesbians don’t exist. they’re just straight men

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There's something so immature and narcissistic about the pronouns thing, about making other people responsible for your mental health and wellbeing.

People are going to make mistakes. I have a relatively unisex name - I occasionally get called sir over the phone. And nothing happens.

Forcing strangers to walk on eggshells around your fragile mental health is unbelievably narcissistic, and throwing s tantrum when they get it wrong is incredibly immature.

Grow up and take responsibility for your own mental health, please.

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