In coordination with the Department of Justice, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Congressman Bob Onder (R-MO) have introduced the Chloe Cole Act, which not only protects children from gender transition procedures but also establishes a private right of action for victims of these mutilating practices.
Congress must send this bill to President Donald Trump so he can sign it into law as soon as possible. It will save the lives of an untold number of American children.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of detransitioners like Chloe Cole in the movement to protect children. Cole, and others like her, bear witness to the irreversible harm of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — and they will carry the scars and physical effects of these interventions all their lives.
Cole and her fellow detransitioners have bravely shared the stories of their suffering, the social and cultural forces that led them to hate their bodies, and their exploitation by doctors who didn’t think twice about harming healthy teenagers. In doing so, they have forced Americans to move beyond progressive euphemisms about “gender-affirming care” and reckon with the bloody reality of these procedures.
The Chloe Cole Act is a long-overdue intervention that restores integrity to the medical profession. Medicine should be a field of healing, not harm or manipulation, but even the American Medical Association supports this gruesome practice. It should go without saying that doctors should not chemically or surgically mutilate children. But the doctors who engage in what they have named “pediatric gender care” routinely violate the rights of patients and the trust of parents — not to mention medicine’s ancient dictum to “do no harm.”
Detransitioners who underwent gender transition procedures as minors identify common elements across their experiences. Despite the irreversible impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, doctors did not fully explain the long-term effects or risks, ignored comorbidities, and often lied about the patient’s mental health history when recommending irreversible surgeries.
Doctors routinely manipulate parents by framing their child’s transition as a matter of life or death. These parents are told that their reluctance to affirm a child’s self-proclaimed “trans” identity or their hesitance about medical intervention could be the reason for their child’s suicide. Doctors emotionally blackmail parents, asking, “Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?” Presented with such dire options by a medical professional, it’s no surprise that parents choose to go along with their child’s transition despite initial resistance.
The physicians who prescribe puberty blockers and hormones or perform “sex reassignment” surgeries purposely damage a healthy body in service of gender ideology. In many cases, they cause infertility by chemically castrating or surgically mutilating children who haven’t even had their first kiss or gone to prom — let alone considered whether they would like to have biological children in the future. Children who are given hormones or undergo surgeries become patients for life, constantly relying on cross-sex hormones to maintain a desired appearance and requiring medical care for complications caused by “top” or “bottom” surgeries.
In fact, this reliance on continued medical treatment is a significant obstacle that detransitioners face. It’s quite easy to access gender transition procedures — they’re federally funded through Medicaid, CHIP, and Medicare, and private insurers also provide coverage. But it’s incredibly difficult to find care throughout a person’s detransition, even as they seek healing for the wounds caused by surgeries.
Chloe Cole has courageously shared that, more than four years after she began to detransition, the wounds from her double mastectomy still 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.”
President Trump didn’t mince words in his address to Congress earlier this year when he said, “I want Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body. This is a big lie. And our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”
It’s time to respond to the president’s request. Congress must pass the Chloe Cole Act. Thousands of children have been lied to and irreparably harmed in the name of transgender ideology, and it’s time to deliver justice to the victims and the perpetrators alike.
Terry Schilling is a parental rights advocate and president of the American Principles Project.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.