Detransitioner Chloe Cole urges Congress to ban gender ‘transition’ procedures for minors during heated Senate hearing

By: Elise Winland, originally published June 4, 2026, The Loop/Zeale News

Chloe Cole, a 21-year-old detransitioner, urged Congress during an emotional June 3 hearing to ban gender “transition” procedures for children, alleging that doctors lied to her family and left her with irreversible physical and emotional harm.

Cole — who began “transitioning” at age 12 before undergoing a double mastectomy at 15 and detransitioning at 16 — testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing titled “Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors.” The  hearing  featured witnesses on both sides of the national debate over whether minors should be able to receive puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-trait surgeries for gender dysphoria.

Cole told senators she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria as a child after struggling with her body and identity. She argued that doctors treated her healthy female body as the problem and subjected her to “sex experimentation procedures” as a child rather than helping her work through her distress. 

“To any normal adult, my middle school insecurities would seem par for the course,” she said, “but to my physicians, clearly they meant that I needed a scalpel to my breasts.”

Cole said her parents — who “never once believed that I was a boy” — were told by doctors that traits such as having short hair or wanting to become an athlete were signs that she “actually was their son” and faced a serious risk of suicide if she did not “transition.”

According to Cole, doctors gave her parents a false choice: Allow their daughter to “transition” or “bury her.” 

“The entire premise of transgenderism is that I will take my own life if I don’t transition,” she told senators. “Yet here I am today.”

Cole said the puberty blockers, testosterone, and double mastectomy she received while she was still developing left her with scars, trauma, pain, nightmares, and uncertainty about whether she will be able to have children. 

“This is not medicine. Medicine heals what is sick, but me being female was not a disease. The lie was the disease,” she argued. “Once doctors denied that boundary between male and female. They also denied the boundary between child and adult. That’s how my confusion became evidence. My parents’ instincts became bigotry, and a surgeon’s knife became care.”

Cole said that when she detransitioned, the “transgender cult” harassed her and her family, and even stalked her grandmother. She also said hundreds of LGBT supporters recently called for her death after learning she planned to speak on a college campus. 

She told senators she knows hundreds of others with similar experiences and warned that an “entire generation of children were lied to.”

“There is no such thing as a child being born in the wrong body,” Cole added, “but there are physicians and medical bodies who prey on the confusion of perfectly healthy young boys and girls.”

Cole urged Congress to prohibit puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-trait surgeries for children. She also called on lawmakers to protect parents who refuse the procedures, investigate hospitals and advocacy groups that promoted them, require disclosure of long-term risks and conflicts of interest, and ensure detransitioners receive proper care.

“Any member of Congress who defends this should have to look parents in the eye and explain why their child’s body is now a commodity that they can sell to the gender industry,” Cole said. “Do not wait until there are more children sitting in this chair crying to you about what was taken from them.”

Republicans on the committee framed the hearing as focused on protecting children. Committee Chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., urged lawmakers to ensure that medical guidelines for children reflect sound evidence rather than ideology. 

“We should not confuse advisory boards being overtaken by activists as if that is necessarily sound scientific evidence,” Cassidy said in his  opening remarks . “We should be treating each child with the specialized care they need, not encouraging a nine-year-old boy to become a girl.”

Democrats and LGBT supporters pushed back, arguing that decisions about gender-related medical care should remain between patients, parents, and doctors rather than federal lawmakers. 

“Gender affirming care for youth should be between a doctor, a patient and their parents, not politicians and the federal government,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said during the hearing.

Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights and a witness invited by Sanders, said that families’ “rights and freedom to make medical decisions for their children” are at stake.

Dr. Kurt Miceli, chief medical officer for the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, testified that medicine has historically embraced practices later viewed as harmful, citing lobotomies and opioid overprescribing as examples.

He argued that the procedures pose risks, including infertility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density, cardiovascular disease, and surgical complications.

“Tragically, many of these youth will experience lifelong regret, given the irreversible effects of these interventions,” he said.

Between 2019 and 2023, nearly 14,000 minors underwent gender “transition” procedures,  according  to Do No Harm’s Stop the Harm database. The group also reported that sex-change treatments performed on minors generated almost $120 million during that period.

The debate has also moved far beyond Congress, with legal and legislative battles playing out in states across the country. According to the Stop the Harm  database , 23 states currently have age limits on “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Image: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

Elise Winland is a political writer for Zeale.

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