The battle to protect children and youth from harmful transgender practices has not been won, according to detransitioner Chloe Cole. While great progress has been made during the first month of the Trump administration, the battle is far from over, Cole says.
“This is not a point in time where we can just assume that we’ve already won,” Cole told The Daily Signal at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.
“We need to continue to fight, because there’s so much ground left to cover,” she said. “We’ve only thrown the first punches at this movement, and we need to continue until this is completely gone from our country, until no child, no woman, no man is being harmed by this.”
Cole, now 20, was attracted to the transgender movement as a teen and started taking testosterone and puberty blockers at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15. At 16, she detransitioned and about a year later began speaking out against the harms of transgender ideology and the medical practices that had permanently altered her own body.
Cole has testified before Congress, telling her own story, and she remains a leading voice on the transgender issue. While she praised the executive actions President Donald Trump has signed to protect minors from transgender practices, and to protect women from men entering female-only spaces, she says Congress needs to take action to enshrine Trump’s orders into law.
“I’m really impressed with how the Trump administration is handling the transgender issues so far,” Cole said, but cautioned “just having executive orders is not going to be enough.”
On his first day in office, Trump signed an order declaring that there are only two genders—male and female. At the end of January, Trump signed an executive order ending the use of federal funding for the “chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”
On Feb. 5, the president signed an executive order to prevent men from competing in women’s sports by rescinding “all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”
Already, Trump’s actions have faced legal challenges, and some states, such as California and Maine, continue to allow men who identify as women to complete on women’s sports teams.
Even if every state followed Trump’s executive orders protecting minors from transgender procedures and protecting female-only sports and spaces, “the next administration could very easily just roll them back and continue to go into the opposite direction,” Cole said. “We need to start creating legislation on the federal level,” she added.
Asked whether she is seeing an openness to considering passing federal legislation on the issue, Cole said she has “spoken to some people who are actually interested in instituting a federal ban on the medical transitioning and abuse of our children.”
After seeing so much action from the Trump administration, Cole says, she is “cautiously optimistic” leaders in Washington will continue to fight for the protection of the next generation against harmful gender ideology.
“The Left, all the people who have been pushing this, they’re not just going to disappear,” Cole warns of those promoting transgenderism. “Right now, they’re scrambling. They’re confused. They’re disoriented. But these people are eventually going to continue fighting for this. And we need to be vigilant. We cannot stop.”