I’ve been waiting for this one.
For years, we’ve watched an entire medical industry sprint headlong into mutilating confused teenagers, armed with nothing but ideology and invoices. Doctors who should know better have been slicing healthy tissue off adolescents who can’t legally buy a beer, then hiding behind the language of “gender-affirming care” as if branding butchery with a progressive label makes it medicine.
On Monday, Rep. Bob Onder (R-MO), introduced the Chloe Cole Act, a federal bill that would ban gender-related medical procedures on minors and, critically, give kids and their parents the right to sue the doctors who did this to them. It’s named after Chloe Cole, the 21-year-old detransitioner who had a double mastectomy as a teenager and has spent the years since trying to warn the country about what happened to her.
“A vital step in our mission to ensure that no minor in America ever endures the kind of lasting, irreparable damage I experienced,” Cole said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Let that sink in. She’s 21. She’s already living with irreversible damage done to her by adults she trusted. And she’s the one leading the fight to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
Onder, who holds a medical degree himself, didn’t mince words about the industry he’s targeting. “A chain of transgender clinics has exploited these kids for the ideology and for the profit and really done permanent damage to the health of those kids with wrong sex hormones, puberty blockers and even mutilating surgeries,” he told Fox News Digital.
He’s right. And here’s the part that makes my blood boil: the emotional blackmail. Over and over, parents report being told some version of the same line: “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?” It’s a weaponized lie designed to terrify mothers and fathers into consenting to procedures they’d otherwise never approve. Onder called it exactly what it is: “an utter lie.”
The suicide talking point has been debunked repeatedly. The largest study on the subject, published in Sweden, found no long-term mental health improvement from surgical transition. But the clinics keep saying it because it works. A panicked parent will sign almost anything.
The timing of this bill matters. Just weeks ago, a New York jury handed detransitioner Fox Varian a $2 million verdict against the plastic surgeon who performed a double mastectomy on her as a teenager. Varian was 22. The surgeon cut off healthy breast tissue from a girl who couldn’t even vote. A jury looked at the facts and said: you owe her.
That verdict cracked the dam. The Chloe Cole Act is designed to blow it wide open. Under the bill, children and parents would have a federal private right of action against medical providers who perform these procedures on minors. The statute of limitations would be lengthy, because as Onder and Cole both know, many of these kids don’t fully understand what was done to them until years later.
The American Academy of Pediatrics still supports giving minors access to these treatments. Their position statement reads like something drafted by lobbyists, not physicians: “The AAP opposes any laws or regulations that discriminate against transgender and gender-diverse individuals, or that interfere in the doctor-patient relationship.”
Interfere in the doctor-patient relationship. As if a 14-year-old has a “relationship” with the surgeon about to remove her breasts. As if a child is a consenting partner in that transaction and not, in every meaningful sense, a victim of adults who should have said no.
Cole put it plainly in a recent op-ed: “We were lied to by doctors, nurses and therapists when we were vulnerable and confused children. They did irreversible harm to our bodies and minds, making a mockery of the medical profession.”
She’s not wrong. And she’s not alone. Luka Hein, Prisha Mosley, and a growing list of young people are stepping forward to tell similar stories. They were rushed through a pipeline, their doubts dismissed, their parents manipulated, their bodies permanently altered.
The question Onder asked is the one that should keep every hospital administrator up at night: is this happening because of “sick ideology” or a “desire for profit”? The answer, almost certainly, is both. Gender clinics have exploded across the country over the past decade, and they don’t run on goodwill. There’s real money in puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical referrals. Real money in telling a confused 13-year-old that the solution to their pain is a scalpel.
The Chloe Cole Act won’t fix everything. But it does something that should have happened a long time ago: it gives these kids a path to hold the people who hurt them accountable. Not just morally. Legally. In a courtroom, under oath, with consequences.
That’s what accountability looks like.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Fatih Media. Any opinions expressed within this piece are solely those of the author and are not sponsored by the organization.
