Chloe Cole: 'I'm Still Recovering' From Hormones, Surgery at 15

My name is Chloe Cole and I'm an 18-year-old detransitioner from the Central Valley of California. I started socially transitioning and identifying as transgender when I was 12 years old and I was fast-tracked onto medicalization at 13 starting with puberty blockers and testosterone before I went on to get a mastectomy at 15 and I stopped transitioning at 16 when I realized that I had regretted my transition and that it was starting to cause me emotional and also physical harm. People often blame my parents and they say like they should have known better and that I should be suing them right now but I think they're victims just as much as I am. My parents actually had pushed back on me medically transitioning at first but the team of the medical professionals that helped me to push me really to transition never presented any other options. They said that the rate of regret is less than one or two percent and they even lied to my parents that I would be at risk of suicide were I not allowed to transition. My medical transition lasted for about three and a half years and during that period of time there was really only one doctor who pushed back on it and that was the first endocrinologist who I saw in order to get hormones. He told me and my mom that there would be risks for my brain development but immediately after I was just referred to another endocrinologist and after only about six months of being diagnosed with dysphoria I was I was placed on puberty blockers and then testosterone a month or so after that. I had been sexually assaulted in my eighth grade year and that prompted me to start hiding that area of my body. I mean I didn't even recognize it as sexual assault and I didn't I didn't realize how much it really had affected me but I bought my first binder about a week after that happened. I would work out in this thing I would I would go swimming in it even and I got sick of it pretty quick. I wanted to be free of it and I wanted to be able to go out without a shirt without having these things that I didn't want on my chest and in my sophomore year that was when I really started to consider surgery and I brought this up to my uh my therapist and I was referred to a gender specialist before being referred to a surgeon. I had been diagnosed with social anxiety and depression and my mental state was rapidly declining and my grades were really starting to suffer and somehow this wasn't considered when I went to surgery. I was 15 years old it was it was far too easy for me to go through this it was only about half a year between being referred to that surgeon and actually going under the knife. After I had to get the stitches taken out and I had to start doing my dressings that is when reality started to hit. Every single night after every bath after every shower I would have to look down at these huge wounds. I mean I would I was told that this would be part of the process but you don't really understand just how much of a toll it will take on you until you go through it. It's certainly not for kids no 15 year old girl should have to go through that. Eventually I started to realize that I missed little things about being a girl. Sometimes when nobody was home I would I would put on makeup or wear some of my old girl clothes but I was I was ashamed of it and I never told anybody about it but I kept struggling with these these feelings and I continued to get worse. I had to eventually drop out of school and go into an alternative program in which I was taking a psychology class and there was one lesson that was about parenting maternity and the development of a child into teenhood. One of the most important parts of the lesson that really stood out to me was breastfeeding and how important physical affection um excuse me um how that bond is important to the emotional and cognitive development of a child and how they they function later in social situations. I mean before that I never really thought about being a parent or breastfeeding. During one of the consultations for my surgery I was told that I would lose my ability to breastfeed but at this time this didn't mean anything to me because I didn't know anything about that. I wasn't even thinking about being a parent because I was 15 years old. I was I had just completed my sophomore year there was no way that I would able to really understand what that meant. It was then that I realized that something beautiful and uniquely female was taken away from me forever and I was perfectly healthy before that. I was only a kid. I really didn't get any help with with the transitioning. I basically just did it all on my own and I never got any guidance. I stopped taking testosterone cold turkey and I experienced some complications from that. My my gender specialist who referred me to the surgery really was at a loss of what to do with me and I've I've talked to my surgeon. I've reported that I regret my surgery and that I'm having complications with it years afterward and his response was okay just put some Vaseline on it that'll that'll fix things but it actually temporarily made it worse and that was really the last straw. I feel like now I can't depend on my health care provider or any doctors at all. I don't think the biggest problem with my transition was that I regretted it. What's more damaging was that they lied to me and my parents. They coerced my parents into allowing me to do this. They withheld a lot of information from us but even even then at the age I was I just wasn't capable of giving informed consent and it's seriously affected both my mental and physical health. I'm still recovering to this day. I don't know if I'll be able to conceive a child or safely care to term and I certainly won't be able to breastfeed and the people that did this to me need to be held accountable.