Seventeen-year-old Chloe Cole, who de-transitioned after treatments including surgery, in a fruitless effort to become male, said Florida officials. The radical gender theory sweeping the nation can have dangerous and even deadly consequences on kids.
Chloe, who at age 13 took puberty blockers and two years later had a double mastectomy, which “irreversibly and painfully” damaged her body, said she now is unlikely to ever be a mother and faces a heightened risk of cancer. Her testimony came during a public hearing on whether Florida should reimburse people for what advocates call “gender-affirming care.”
“No child should have to experience what I have,” the California teen told the rapt hearing, which included state Medicaid and Board of Medicine officials.
“My consent was not informed.”
Last month, Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) unveiled Rule 59F-1.050, which would bar children from undergoing sex-change treatments and stop Medicaid from funding transitions for adults.
In a previous interview, Chloe said she became radicalized on gender theory when she was just 11 from following LGBTQ activists on Instagram.
“‘I saw how trans people online got an overwhelming amount of support, and the amount of praise they were getting really spoke to me because, at the time, I didn’t really have a lot of friends of my own,’” she told the New York Post.
Chloe told her parents she was really a boy when she was 13, began going by “Leo,” and took testosterone. Two years later, she made what she now regards as a heartbreaking mistake.
“I was unknowingly physically cutting off my true self from my body, irreversibly and painfully,” she told the Florida gathering.” That realization, actually, was one of the biggest things that led to me realizing that this was not the path that I should have taken.”
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado urged Florida’s Board of Medicine to stop children considering sex changes from having access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
“The current standards set by numerous professional organizations appear to follow a preferred political ideology instead of the highest level of generally accepted medical science,” Ladapo wrote in a letter to the board. “Florida must do more to protect children from politics-based medicine. Otherwise, children and adolescents in our state will continue to face a substantial risk of long-term harm.”
Chloe recently told Common Sense News that she had a message for parents at the Tallahassee meeting.
“Do not transition your kids,” she said.
Florida’s Medicaid office does not support public funding of sex transitions, but under the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA), recipients of government-subsidized health care must be eligible for the treatments.
Reporting from The Daily Wire.
