The media has focused endless attention on the many kids who are trying to transition genders.
But what about the growing number of young adults who are detransitioning — who regret the sex changes that doctors and nurses told us to undergo when we were kids?
The young girls and boys who were lied to — who were abused — by the medical system we were told to trust when we were most impressionable, most vulnerable?
What about people like me?
I ask these questions every day.
It’s been eight years since I started to transition—and four years since I started to detransition.
I realized my mistake when I was 16 years old.
I’d tried to change genders before I was even a teenager.
March 12 is a sad yet meaningful day for people like me.
It’s what we call “Detransition Awareness Day.”
For the first time, Congress is introducing a resolution to mark this day.
And this week Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw will introduce a bill to permanently protect kids from being forced down the dark road of gender transitioning.
Crenshaw’s bill is closely connected to President Trump’s executive order banning federal funding for any medical facility that provides sex-change treatments to kids.
While the president’s order is long overdue, it could easily be overturned by a future administration — and right now, it’s on pause because of federal lawsuits.
Kids are still being hurt every day.
The new House bill would protect them. It cuts off, by law, much of the federal funding for children’s hospitals that try to help kids do a sex-change.
A huge number of US hospitals perpetrate this medical and moral monstrosity — 54, according to the medical nonprofit Do No Harm.
All told, those hospitals gave nearly 14,000 sex-change treatments to kids between 2019 and 2023.
More than 5,700 of those treatments were surgeries. Penises cut off. Vaginas inverted. Breasts removed.
The kids who experience this horror will never be able to lead a normal life.
I know because it happened to me.
When I first started my sex change, the doctors and nurses told me I could go back.
I believed them when they put me on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
But I could tell that those drugs — those powerful, irreversible drugs — were changing my body.
Before long, I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror.
I still believed the doctors when they told me to get a double mastectomy.
I let them cut off my breasts.
To this day, I have wounds where they used to be.
Not just scars.
Wounds that bleed.
If I ever have kids — and I’m not sure I can — I’ll never be able to breastfeed.
The doctors made sure of that.
And those same doctors refused to see me once I said I regretted it.
By the time I realized I’d made a mistake and couldn’t go back, by the time I realized that the doctors and nurses and psychiatrists were radicals who didn’t really care about me, the damage was done.
What happened to me should never happen to another kid — ever.
But every day, it does happen.
Children’s hospitals are ruining children’s lives in the name of radical transgender ideology.
They need to be stopped.
Those kids need to be protected from this insanity.
Their bodies need to be saved.
Their minds need to be saved.
Believe me when I say that trying to change your sex messes you up.
How could it not?
You’re trying to become something you’re not — something that so-called “experts” said you are, even though they don’t really know you or care about you.
No wonder so many people are trying to go back.
I’ve talked with hundreds of people who have detransitioned, almost all of them teens and young adults.
If they’d waited a few years, they never would have tried a sex change.
But they were pushed along by people who should have known better.
On March 12, we’re asking Congress to protect kids from ever being subjected to the pain we’ve felt. It’s time to cut off every penny of taxpayer funds to children’s hospitals that subject kids to sex changes.
And it’s time for the Department of Justice to make good on the president’s order to investigate whether doctors are misleading kids about the effects of sex-change drugs, like I was misled.
Detransitioners like me aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we’re only getting more numerous, because more and more kids are being abused.
And we’re only going to get louder until Congress permanently protects America’s kids from the evil that was perpetrated against us.
Chloe Cole is the patient advocate at Do No Harm.
