In this podcast episode, Lisa interviews Chloe Cole, a detransitioned individual, who shares her personal journey of transitioning as a child and the challenges she faced. Chloe discusses the lack of support during her detransition and the financial motivations behind transgender surgeries. She emphasizes the importance of exploring oneself and not rushing into life-altering decisions at a young age. Chloe also shares her passion for art and her desire to pursue fashion design as a career. The Truth with Lisa Boothe is part of the iHeartRadio Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
Chloe Cole was twelve years old when she decided she was transgender. A year later, at thirteen, she went on puberty blockers and testosterone. At fifteen, she had major surgery, getting a double misectomy. Only a year later, at sixteen, she realized she had made a horrible mistake. Now she's eighteen, she's de transitioned, and she's speaking out, trying to protect children from being put through what she went through, and she joins me on this episode to discuss her personal journey and why adults are pushing young people to transition. Stay tuned for this can't missinterview with Chloe Cole. Chloe, it's an honor to have you on the show. I just wanted to tell you upfront that I really respect what you're doing and just trying to bring awareness. I know that it is scary. It's hard to stand up against the mob, so just want to thank you for your courage in doing so.
And thank you for having me. Lisa.
What's that been like to stand up against the mob with this.
I never really expected to be doing anything like this in my life. I mean throughout most of my childhood and teenhood, I was like a really shy kid, and I was kind of like on the artistic side, so I mostly just like kept myself and I thought that I would pursue I would pursue a career in something artistic related, which I probably will down the road. I never thought that I would ever be doing something like public facing or public speaking. It's been quite the adjustment over the past year, but I found that I actually really enjoy doing it. I get a lot more support than I do backlash, and that's really nice. But I get my fair share of hate just for talking about my experience having conditioned as a kid and what it's been like going through that as a kid and coming back from it.
Well, I'm glad to hear you're getting more support than hate. That's comforting. I'm glad to hear that. You know. Before we get into your story specifically, I wanted to ask you, why do you think there is such a push right now to encourage young people to transition.
The narrative right now is that the younger you start transitioning, the better, because when you start a kid on puberty blockers and hormones and cross sex hormones, then if there is fork, they won't have the undesired secondary sex characteristics that would usually pop up during puberty, and therefore that won't cause them any further dysphoria or discomfort with their body. But that narrative isn't really take an account just how difficult it really is to transition as a minor, and how dangerous these treatments are. The younger you are and while you're developing.
How dangerous are these treatments.
They call it life saving care, but it's really life threatening if anything, and it's absolutely not care. I mean, they say that things like puberty blockers and cross sex hormones are reversible, but none of the treatments that I have been on, which I've had, I've had my puberty blocks, I've been onto stosterone, and I underwent in double miseectomy, none of them were safe, and absolutely none of them were. I'll never be able to get that lost growth or my breast back ever. And on top of that, I'm experiencing very serious complications from all three.
What are those complications?
While while I was on the blockers, because I was already a few years in a pure be it basically put me into a chemically induced state of menopause, and so I was very lethargic, and I had a reduced appetite, and I was kind of depressed throughout the day because I didn't really have much energy. And on top of that, I was I was experiencing menopausal symptoms hot flashes and itching all over my body while I was thirteen, and that's something that normally I would have not experienced until I hit maybe my fifties and sixties, as I actually went into a natural menopause, But the disosterone.
I haven't gotten.
A fertility test, but it's very likely that I might have impacted my fertility in some way because my hips were not expanding and developing as they should have been through my puberty. I don't know what effect could have had on things like the quality of my eggs or the overall health of my reproductive system, but I was told that it might cause atrophy in my vaginal area and my fertility. Granted, I was told this when I was only thirteen years old, and I didn't really know what any of that meant. I wasn't even sexually active yet, and I was I didn't even know what things like ovulation or the four stages of the menstrual cycle where I only knew that there was a period and somehow I could get pregnant after it started. I didn't really fully understand how things like that worked because I was a kid, and because I didn't have I wasn't far enough and to my education to have any comprehensive education on things like that.
I was really young.
And it also I wasn't informed that that atrophy would actually spread to the rest of my reproductive system and even organs in the pelvic area that are outside of that system, which it ended up affecting my urinary.
Tract as well.
After a while, I started to take experience a lot of urinary attract infections and then eventually I start getting blood and even tissue in my urine, which has since stopped.
I still do have some issues.
With the urinary tract, like not being able to fully empty my bladder and the misseectomy, I think is where some of the worst complications come from. I mean, all will never be able to breastfeed obviously, now that the tissue is gone from my body, I'm not going to be able to grow it back by any means. And they severed my areolas and the stalk of the nipples, so I'm never going to be able to breastfeed. I've also had some nerve damage because of that, and luckily it's not too bad, but I've lost pretty much all the erogenous sensation that I would have had in there. So I've had a large part of myself as an adult woman, a large part of my sexuality, of myself as an aspiring mother, taken from me. And now thes the skin grafts that they use and the surgery are leaking fluid every day, every moment, and I have no idea what the flute is. I can't really do anything about it because I've tried to go to my to try and figure out what it is, and he gave me advice that actually made it worse, and he was very dismissive of my concerns and all these complications that I've had. I haven't gotten any help from my doctors since.
My heart breaks hearing you, you know, talk about that and just laying out what you went through because you were a baby. I mean, I'm thirty eight years old, so a twelve year old in my eyes is a child as a baby. You were thirteen when they put you on puberty blockers. Fifteen when you underwent a double misseectomy. Nobody at that age thinks about the future in this way. Nobody at the age can comprehend a major surgery like that. Do you feel like these adults preyed on you?
This is absolutely a form of preying on me.
They gave me a fraudulent treatment which was eatrogenic and cause more issues down the line, and failed to treat my original diagnosis. And it was under the guise of life saving care, gender affirming care that this would resolve my generous for you and help me to become my true self as a man.
But that never happened.
And while I truly did believe that I was a man, nothing that I could have ever done to my body, no matter what injections I took, no matter what drugs I was on, no matter what parts of my body I had taken off or stitchback on, nothing would have made me a man, because that's something that's determined at the moment of conception.
And it's an emotional blackmail, is what I'm hearing. Because they go to parents and they tell them that you know, you're otherwise going to commit suicide if they don't go along with this. And then they go to kids and say, you're not who you were born to be. You're not right. You have to change yourself in such a substantial way to undergo surgery. I mean, so it's an emotional blackmail, is what it is.
That is exactly what they told my parents.
What do your parents think of this? Now? You know? Where are they on all of this?
They feel like they've been duped by the doctors as much as I have. I feel like I really feel like they were, even if they didn't experience it directly, they were just as hurt through this tree. It was really hard for them to watch me try and become somebody that I wasn't and just get worse over time. And they were correct at the start. They thought that this was just a result of distress I had from things that weren't necessarily related to my sex, especially because of my difficulties growing up with school and interacting with my peers and making friends and not really fitting in with other kids my age, especially the girls. They thought of it as a mental health issue and that by sending me to a therapist that it would be worked on and that this issue would resolve. But the doctors never did that they never went into any of the underlying causes behind my gener dys for you, and instead they just affirmed this false identity. I had this idea, this delusion I had that I wasn't my parents' daughter, I was actually their son.
You had mentioned the mental health aspect of this isn't what you think is going on with a lot of these young people who you know are just facing confusion and trying to figure themselves out.
That's absolutely where it comes from. There is kind of a social contagion aspect to it. None of my peers were transgender at the time that I started transitioning, and I didn't learn about this from school or in class. I never heard about things like gender sexuality in the classroom ever, and I graduated just last year. It was entirely from social media that I learned about this from. I was using the Internet a lot because, like I said, I didn't really get along with my peers, and I didn't feel like I had much in the way of the community, and I wasn't particularly close to any of my family members, probably due to my age difference between me and the rest of my siblings. But I also wasn't like any evolved in any sports or clubs at school, and so I didn't really feel like I had anywhere to turn, and I was also being bullied. I decided that I would take to the Internet and just find my community on there, and the screen certainly was a lot more engaging than what I had going on in real life in my classes with my peers and elsewhere. It didn't help that my school district was handing out lap pops to kids at the youngest grade levels possible, and as soon as they hit fifth grade they get to take them home. Throughout most of my school years, they were not using any firewall protections or any programs to like block off things like social media programs, so you could access just about any app or service you wanted. I then got my first phone when I was eleven, and of course, because all my peers had one, they were all using social media. That was the first place I went to because I wanted to see what I was missing out on, and I ended up browsing a lot of communities around like the video games and cartoons that I really liked, and that was how I discovered the transgender community. I noticed that a lot of these other young people who identified as transgender were very much like me. They had a lot of the same interests, like the shows I watched, and their feelings around themselves and their body image, and just how they related to other people, especially their same sex. I really felt like I related to it, their struggles, their their upbringings, and so I started to feel like a sense of belonging, even though I wasn't really interacting with anybody directly in the community at the time, I was mostly just browsing these communities. I finally felt like I had an explanation for why I felt so different from other kids my age, and I really clung on to this explanation. I thought that the reason why I didn't fit in with other kids, why I was so awkward, why I was so boyish, why I felt like I didn't even look like a girl, was because I actually had the brain of a boy, and it was just destiny.
For me to become one. That's it's kind of a straight pipeline.
For these kids who don't necessarily conform to things like gender roles, traditional gender roles, or don't really have much of a community, aren't really close with their family or their parents whose parents don't really bring them to church or raise them with like a strict belief system, and don't really make them grow up playing like sports or playing an instrument, or fostering them encouraging them to build up thrown hobbies as a means of building themselves when they lack. When a kid lacks that sort of structure, they'll still search for it in some other way and they'll cling onto whatever they can find.
We're going to take a quick commercial break more with Chloe Coal. On the other side, it sounds like, you know, young people just searching for for acceptance, you know, searching for you know, as we all do when you're young and trying to figure yourself out and you're trying to figure life out and you're dealing with hormonal changes and all these different things that happen as a young person. You know, you had mentioned, you know, going on social media. How big of a role do you think social media plays in this increased you know, transitions that are happening in the United States. It's what role does social media have in all of this?
I mean, that's how a lot of kids are finding out about this. It's very easy to find these communities. I didn't find it wasn't directly presented to me as soon as I started social media. It started for me in communities, in fan bases around video games, shows, anime, and musicians that I liked. A lot of the users in those communities. There is a big overlot between being in those communities and identifying as like as gay or bisexual, or transgender or non binary. I think part of that is a lot of the users in these communities are just kind of offbeat kids who don't really have, like I said, much of a community in real life or a connection with their own family, and they don't really feel like they have anybody to bond with over these these series of media or these these musicians or these interests that they have.
And these communities tend.
To be very liberal because of that, and so it leads to acceptance of questioning, acceptance of just about anything from sexuality to different lifestyles to.
The way that you identify.
You look at the timeline you know for you, So you make this decision at twelve that I think I'm a boy, thirteen puberty blockers, fifteen double miasectomy, regret it a year later. I mean that is a very quick timeline were there no professionals, no doctors, no one that was like, you know what, Hey, maybe we should just take a pause on this. You should think this through, Chloe, You're so young. Were there any experts that were trying to slow this down for you?
I had one doctor and it was the first uncrinologist who had an appointment with He said that I was just too young to be on these treatments and that he was afraid of how it might affect my brain development. But I didn't hear about this from any other doctor or any other source that I had.
They call it gender affirming, obviously, you know, a term to make it sound like this is a kind thing to be doing for young peop Why do you think they use that term specifically?
They say that it's affirming the gender identity of the patient. But that's the problem. It's affirming nothing more than a delusion. It's not reality. It's not affirming anything real. It's not affirming your real gender. To be taking away parts of your body and sterilizing yourself. It really a lot of these phrases are just covering up and even sort of infantilizing what these treatments and what this path really means it makes it easier to sell.
How hard is it to transition? They put you on puberty blockers for a number of years, you know, you undergo the surgery. How hard is it to go back? How hard is it to de transition?
I mean, it's difficult enough to go off of these powerful drugs and deal with the hormonal imbalances that result from it, as well as the surgeries and having had your secondary sex characteristics mutated. But as of right now, there's absolutely no standard of care for people like me who regret their transition and want to go back. I mean I had to figure out how to do it completely.
On my own.
I wasn't getting any guidance at all about things like how I should stop taking testosterone, or what my options might be for my reconstruction, or the complication that I'm already having for my surgery, And I just haven't really gotten any of the appropriate care that I've needed my even psychologically. My gender specialist told me that in the midst of me talking about the pain of my transition to regret that it was just another part of my gender journey, right, and my undercinologists when I told her that I was going off of hormones. I requested that I get regular blood tests to try and figure out where I would be at in terms of like my body producing its own natural hormones and how my homone levels are in comparison to where they should be at. When I got the result back, every time, I was given the guidelines for a teenage boy. So absolutely all around, I just didn't get any of the help that I needed. There's no codes for patients like me. They have absolutely no standards of care in place for dtrunsitioners at all.
So they lead you down this path and then they abandon you when you decide to no longer go on.
It just about yeah, I mean, there is no discussion of what it might look like if I were to regret this and to decide to stop taking these treatments. I didn't even know what the word dtrenition was until after I stopped transitioning. I had never heard it before.
Quick commercial break more in d transitioning. You know, there's so much money in this. I saw one report saying that the industry surrounding transgender surgery is expected to reach five billion by the end of the decade. How much of this push do you believe is financially motivated.
Almost completely, actually, I mean it's financially motivated as well as ideolog ideologically motivated. I think that's another reason of why people are pushing this on children younger and younger. It basically guarantees them to life of being a patient and a slave to the pharmaceutical industry by interfering with their puberty. The younger you do it, and once their sex hormones are either compromised or removed, they're not able to produce their own sex hormones anymore naturally, and so they have to be reliant on exogenists hormones of either sex to live. Basically, otherwise they'll be in an artificially induced state of menopause for the rest of your life. At a very young age, there's pretty much a guarantee at least one of the treatments that you'll be on that you'll have some sort of complication from them, and it will either require surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. These complications and these medications just keep piling up, and you become very profitable.
What would you tell young people who are feeling lost right now and potentially considering going down the road that you went down.
I think you get the nail on the head that feeling lost like this is just another part of growing up. And I don't think you're really supposed to feel like you've found your path, and so maybe after your twenties, and for some people it takes even longer than that. I mean, there's a lot of people who are in their forties and fifties and they still don't know whether they want to be on that same career path their whole life, or whether they want to have children. Being young is just exploring yourself, is just part of it. And I think it's ridiculous to expect a child, or even most people under the age of twenty five, to be able to make a decision that will affect pretty much every single part of their life, from the way that they experience their sexuality down to basic bodily functions like orgasm, the people that you're attracted to, your romantic your platonic and familiar relationships, your fertility, the overall picture of your health, and the way that you socialize. It is a lot for somebody to take on, especially while they're so young and while they're still discovering themselves. It's not fair to expect them to push them into making a decision that will affect them for the rest of their life in every single way possible. And it takes a lot of years, a lot of experience in the world to know whether this is something that you might want. And oftentimes a desire to go down this route stems from previous traumas or comorbid issues. I mean, a lot of these patients have some sort of learning disability, many of them are autistic. Many of them have either experienced sexual abuse or trauma, or they've been abused verbally or physically, or neglected by a family member, especially in early childhood.
It makes me so sad to hear. What would you tell parents who are also facing this, who might be being emotionally blackmailed right now by professionals, being told that, you know, the choice is either this or their child is going to commit suicide. You know, what would you say to parents who are being burdened by that kind of emotional black man Not.
Easy hearing those things, especially from a medical professional who you think you're supposed to trust. But in this situation, you just might have to go against the advice that they're giving you and remain logical because the arguments that they're using are very much emotional blackmail. If your child is feeling suicidal, it's not because of their sex. There is some sort of underlying issue that is not being addressed that they need help with. This is a cry of help. It's a cry for help from your child. They need to know that they're loved, that they're perfect as they are, and the issue is not their body, but the way that they perceive it. A problem I notice with a lot of these kids is that they're very withdrawn from other children and they need socialization, but they don't. They're afraid of it. They feel as though they can't fit in with their peers. They won't be able to find the sense of community of belonging that they want. It's very important to assess that where they're learning or what's influencing them to want to become the opposite sex, and what makes them think that is possible, whether it's from school, their classes, what they're learning, or from their peers, or from social media. To address the problem directly and also making sure that you're fostering other parts of their life, the growth of say they're building their hobbies, I think that sports are really important for the sort of thing, especially as you're growing up, because you're working on something as part of a team towards a goal, and you learn things like leadership in sportsmanship, and you're also you're working on your body in a way that isn't really focused on the form and how it looks as much as the function of it. And I think that's really important, especially for kids who either have bodied image disorders or at an age where they're prone developing them, because they learn to appreciate what they have for what it.
Can do and not for its appearance.
Chloe, what's ahead in your future? What are you hopeful about?
Well, my goal in my activism is to stop childhood transition from being performed ever again. To address the affirmative care model and to fix it and make it so that it's not so much of a one size fits all care model for all just FOK patients, to address the underlying conditions that these patients have, to see them towards a path that isn't as invasive, to where they don't feel like they have to address a psychological issue with a highly invasive set of procedures that will affect them for life. I think once once the fight's over and my goals are fulfilled. I've become a very family oriented person over the years, and I won't have children on my own. But even after this issue is addressed, there's still a lot of other issues that are affecting families and especially children in the modern day.
I don't have children on my own yet, but.
I have nieces and nephews and younger cousins, and I worry for them every day. I want them to grow up in a world where I feel like they'll be safe outside of activism. Like I said earlier, I've always kind of been on the artistic side. I love doing illustration. Growing up, I did a lot of character illustration and design, and in recent years I've gotten into fashion design and coordination of clothing and outfits, and it's really been a big part of my detransition. But I think that I want to make it into something bigger than that. I think I want to again into fashion design as a full time thing and eventually start my own brand one day.
I love that. Chloe Cole. I'm praying that you have the most beautiful life ahead and you fulfill all your passions and hopes, and I just respect you and just appreciate your courage and speaking out and trying to protect other kids so they don't have to go through what they put you through. And I'm so sorry they did that, but I'm so proud of you for standing up and speaking out.
Thank you so much.
That was Chloe Cole, just eighteen years old. I don't know about you, but it really just gives a human side to the suffering that so many people are going through and figuring themselves out and how easily they are being taken advantage of, particularly when we're looking at young people on this issue. So broke my heart. Really respect what she does and her voice and all of this. It's so important. I want to thank you guys at home for listening. I want to thank John Cassio and my producer for putting the show together every Monday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. Feel free to leave us a review, give us a rating on Apple Podcast. Until next time,