The Heretics
“I don’t want what happened to me to happen ever again to any other child,” Chloe Cole said during a May 25 interview with True North.
What happened to her was that at age 12, she tumbled deep into an Internet rabbit hole where she became convinced that maturing into a woman would be an appalling and humiliating experience. “[T]he feminist dogma that I was being exposed to on websites like Instagram and Tumblr would talk about how painful the female experience is and how horrific and useless things like pregnancy and childbirth were,” she said. “It was very anti-woman, and it would often ridicule not only these processes, but mothers and … the traditional role of the woman.”
Chloe added: “Things like that made me very afraid of becoming a woman and eventually experiencing those things for myself.”
Many of the individuals posting in the communities that 12-year-old Chloe frequented were—or claimed to be—young girls who said they had been born into the wrong body and had started identifying as male. “I found it really relatable because growing up I was a bit on the tomboyish side,” she said. “I always felt like there was something that was setting me apart from the other kids, and now it seemed like I had an explanation for this feeling.”
The truth is, almost all young people experience some social struggles, concerns about fitting in among peers, and apprehension about adulthood. If Chloe had lived in a different time and place, the authorities in her life would have reassured her that what she was feeling was common. They would have explained that womanhood is a wonderful thing, and lovingly guided her to embrace her biological nature.
But this was 2016 in California.
Chloe and her parents were soon in consultations with a range of specialists who said she had severe gender dysphoria and needed urgent medical treatment. “They told my parents that there was no other option, that it couldn’t wait until I was an adult, that it had to happen now—and if it didn’t, then it would be very likely that I would kill myself.”
They were asked: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
Chloe wasn’t in the room for these momentous conversations. And she says that she was never suicidal until after her parents were pressured into following the specialists’ advice.
Dosed and Diced
At age 13, Chloe was put on a potent puberty blocker called Lupron that suppresses the body’s production of sex hormones. Within weeks of the first injection, she was experiencing hot flashes and unusual itching all over her body. “I was going through menopause when I was in 8th grade,” she said.
Chloe also became lethargic, despondent and unable to focus at school. But then it was time for the next phase of her treatment: testosterone. Before the first injection, an endocrinologist told her that the combination of puberty blockers and testosterone injections would cause vaginal atrophying that would make sexual activity painful for her without topical estrogen. “But I was 13 years old,” she said, “and I wasn’t sexually active yet, so I didn’t really understand what any of this meant.”
The same endocrinologist also told Chloe at this time that these drugs would likely affect her fertility as an adult. “But I was still a kid, and I wasn’t thinking about having kids of my own,” she said. “I didn’t know how important that would be … so I just said, ‘I’m fine with that.’”
So she was injected with testosterone, and soon her lethargy was overtaken by liveliness and confidence. “I felt amazing because now my body I thought was finally healthy again and I had my energy back,” she said. She also began growing more angular and muscular, with a sharper jawline, broader shoulders and increased body and facial hair. She began sounding like an entirely different person. “Throughout high school I actually had a deeper voice than most of the boys my age, and even some of my teachers.”
With the chemical alterations in place, the specialists said it was time for the next step in Chloe’s transition: going under the knife.
On June 3, 2020, at age 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. “My breasts are completely gone,” she said, adding that the procedure included skin grafts that continue to leak fluid even three years later. “I have to wear bandages over my chest every day because of this and it won’t stop, and I have no idea what it is.” The surgeon who gave Chloe her disfiguring wound and skin grafts told her that all she can do is keep Vaseline and bandages on the area.
During the months before and after her mastectomy, Chloe was going by the name Leo. And despite the complications, she was a darling of her high school. “It was really nice for a while,” she said. “I was making friendships and getting social opportunities that I didn’t really have before.”
But it didn’t take long for the novelty to fade.
A few months after the surgery, Chloe began recoiling away from the person she saw in the mirror. The sight of her figure physically nauseated her, and it was then, for the first time, that she became suicidal.
‘The Way Back’
By May of 2021, Chloe, now 17, was convinced that her attempt to transition had been a colossal mistake caused mainly by medical experts who had pushed it on her and her parents. “The process of my diagnosis wasn’t thorough enough,” she said. “They had on file that I previously had the diagnosis of adhd, that I had some very strong symptoms of autism, and I had social difficulties and that I had symptoms of a body image disorder. But none of this was even taken into consideration during the diagnosis or the treatment.”
Overcome with regret, she stopped taking testosterone injections and began presenting as female once again. But sudden cessation of the male sex hormone was another great jolt to her young body and mind, leaving her physically sickly and emotionally unstable. “The way back hasn’t been easy,” she said. “It became really difficult to regulate myself emotionally because of the extreme hormonal imbalance in my body and it was affecting all of my relationships.”
By the time she was a few months into her senior year, Chloe had essentially no friends. She soon failed out of school.
As the complications persisted, she also found herself largely rejected by the very specialists who had pushed her to transition. “After stopping transition,” she said, “you pretty much just get kicked to the side by your own doctors who helped you to get these treatments.” She added: “There’s no codes in place in health care for people who stopped transitioning or regret their transition or have had some sort of complication from these treatments, so there’s nothing for doctors to really abide by when deciding how to treat us.”
On top of all this, Chloe also became a target for harassment by the trans activists who had assured her years earlier that trying to become male would solve her problems. “Just talking about my regret, they found it offensive, and they told me that my experience wasn’t important,” she said. The activists told Chloe she was “harming the transgender community” because her message of regret was “preventing people from getting the care that real transgender people needed.”
It didn’t take long for the harassment to push her into silence. “I stopped speaking about my experience for a while,” she said.
But as she came to more fully realize all that she had been through, Chloe felt she couldn’t keep quiet. “I wanted to expose the transgender community and how it takes vulnerable children and young adults and how it treats the people whose transitions are a failure,” she said. “And I felt the responsibility to take that upon myself because I don’t want what happened to me to happen ever again to any other child because this is never an appropriate treatment for children ever.”
She has filed a high-profile lawsuit against her health-care provider and doctors who “decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment” on her, according to the litigation. And she devotes her time now to speaking out against what she calls the “abuse” it is “to let a child believe that they were in fact born in the wrong body.” And Chloe is not alone.
‘Slow This Train Down’
A Veterans Affairs psychologist in 2013 convinced deeply depressed Navy seal Chris Beck that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. Beck underwent hormone therapy, facial surgery and breast augmentation. “I was naive; I was in a really bad way; I was taken advantage of,” he said in a December 2022 interview with Robby Starbuck. Two months earlier, Beck had announced on Facebook that he was detransitioning. “I have lived in hell for the past 10 years,” he wrote. “I look back and I see how I destroyed everything in my life that was holy, the temple of God, our bodies, what we have here,” and “I wish I’d had someone that would have helped me.” Beck has since tried to be that person to others. He speaks out, warning parents and children not to let “experts” coerce them into making life-altering decisions. “Someone has to try to slow this train down,” Beck wrote. “I stood up against madness to save innocent children.”
Helena Kerschner, a woman from Ohio, began transitioning at age 20. “I was … given the green light to start transition by my doctor on the first visit,” she wrote in a June 25, 2021, Newsweek op-ed. “One year later, I would be curled in my bed, clutching my double-mastectomy scars and sobbing with regret” because what she thought was gender dysphoria “turned out to stem from other mental health issues.” The cross-sex hormones rendered her suicidal and culminated in two hospitalizations for self-harm. Regarding her decision to warn others not to follow her path, she wrote: “Real lives are at stake.”
Soren Aldaco was absorbed into niche online subculture groups at age 11 and started cross-sex hormones at 17. Two years later, she underwent a double mastectomy. She suffered “massive bilateral hematomas” from the procedure as well as vaginal atrophy, hormone instability and serious gastroenterological issues. She was soon on 11 different prescription medications to deal with the range of physical and psychological problems. Six months after the surgery, she began detransitioning. In March, she testified to the Texas state legislature against “gender-affirming care,” saying, “Children deserve better than plastic surgery and hormones.”
The stories of women such as Camille Kiefel, Grace Lidinsky-Smith and Charlie Evans are similar. After Charlie went public with her warnings, she was contacted by more than 300 other people who said they had similar experiences.
How Many Have ‘Transition Regret’?
Trans activists say the experience of Chloe and these others are so rare that they are irrelevant and are actually dangerous to bring into the discussion. They claim that the number who experience “transition regret” is minuscule and should not be allowed to slow their crusade to radically remake society. For proof they point very often to a study conducted by the Archives of Sexual Behavior in Sweden from 1960 to 2010. It found that 2.2 percent of transitioners rued their decision.
But we must recognize how drastically society has changed in recent years.
Until 2013, individuals seeking to live as the opposite sex were labeled as mentally ill by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is regarded as holy writ by professional psychologists. The overwhelming majority of ordinary people also viewed such individuals in a negative light. These perceptions made it extremely rare for anyone to identify and seek to live as the opposite sex. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare said in 2005 that over the previous decades only about 1 in 100,000 of the nation’s people had taken that path.
Those who took part in the 1960-to-2010 study were among this tiny fragment of a percent. And they would have taken medical steps to change their sex in spite of heavy stigma and only after years of counseling and deliberation. They were also all adults when they made the momentous decision. So perhaps it is unsurprising that almost 98 percent of them stayed the course.
But in 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders dropped the label “gender identity disorder” in favor of “gender dysphoria” and said the condition isn’t a pathology to be fixed so much as a distress that should be somehow resolved. This change was part of a broad societal shift in the Western world away from traditional sex roles and toward exalting all lifestyles nontraditional and non-heterosexual. And in the decade since, the shift has gained stunning momentum and has utterly transformed the societal landscape.
The world today is starkly different from how it was for most of the time of the Swedish study, particularly for young people.
Gallup found last year that the number of American adults now identifying as something other than heterosexual has risen to a new high of 7.1 percent. And for the youngest adults surveyed—those born from 1997 to 2003—the figure was a stunning 20.8 percent. Meanwhile, a Pew poll from the same year found that 40 percent of Americans believe gender is fluid, not determined by sex identified at birth.
In this societal climate, huge numbers of young people are profoundly confused. And the moment one of them utters a word about gender perplexity or body image problems, many peers and even parents rush to apply the now chic diagnosis of transgenderism. And medical experts increasingly insist that the only viable remedy for any such perplexity is rapid “transition.” A study in the United Kingdom showed that from 2009 to 2019, the number of children advised to medically transition increased 1,000 percent for males and 4,400 percent for females.
The trendiness of the trans label and the hastiness of such medical quackery means far more people now decide to transition, and most of them do so with little counting of the cost.
The result is that far more than 2 percent come, as Chloe did, to quickly regret the decision. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism published a study in 2022 called “Continuation of Gender Affirming Hormones Among Transgender Adolescents and Adults.” It examined 1,000 individuals who started taking cross-sex hormones and found that four years later, around 70.2 percent of them were still taking them.
This leaves almost 30 percent in Chloe’s situation—a number almost 14 times greater than the oft-cited one from the outdated study on Swedes.
And since the trans trend has gone mainstream so rapidly, even this 30 percent figure may not reflect the long-term rates of reversal. “The full extent of regret and detransition in young people transitioning today, under vastly different circumstances than in the past, will not be known for many years,” Sarah Jorgenson, a University of Toronto Ph.D. student, wrote in the June 2023 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
This is a chilling reality. Switching sexes is being sold as a panacea to troubled youth. The hormones and surgeries have permanent and grotesque effects on their bodies and minds. Yet we seldom hear about the way many of these individuals realize they actually do identify with their biological sex and wish they had never been pushed down this twisted, nightmarish path.
‘Male and Female Created He Them’
Activists are convincing more and more young people and their parents that trying to switch sexes is the way to treat confusion and to find happiness. But it is clearly causing a great deal of suffering. This is a general phenomenon in human conduct that the Bible warned about: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man,” Proverbs 14:12 states, “but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
The solutions that people devise to try to solve life’s problems seem sound to them. But human perception is tragically unreliable. And in many cases, it is only after going all in on a certain method and then seeing it catastrophically fail that we come to understand that we were in error from the start. Even then, we sometimes refuse to admit defeat and instead double down on the same doomed solution.
Jeremiah 17:9 states, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Our hearts blind us very cleverly to our own evil. Even when we are behaving in utterly selfish and destructive ways, they can convince us, on some level, that we are the light of men.
How can we rise above our faulty perception and our blinding self-deception? The only way is to stop placing our trust in our scheming hearts and place it instead in the God who created us.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” Psalm 111:10 states. Learning to fear God—which means to deeply respect Him and acknowledge the superiority of His thinking over ours—is the crucial first step. It is the beginning of wisdom. The psalm goes on to explain how to put that “fear” into action: “a good understanding have all they that do his commandments ….”
In the Ten Commandments, along with the statutes and judgments, the Creator has explained the way that leads people to live stable, fulfilled, happy lives. Most today, even many who identify as Christian, generally dismiss the laws that the Bible spells out. But Proverbs 29:18 assures us that keeping them fosters good living: “[H]e that keepeth the law, happy is he.”
God did not give the law to oppress men and women. It was not preserved in Scripture to keep people from having an enjoyable life or to lade us with feelings of guilt. He is the one who created us and is therefore uniquely positioned to know what makes us either happy or miserable. The law was recorded in detail to outline the path to a stable life, and a free one. James 1:25 calls it “the perfect law of liberty.” There is no other path to real freedom and happiness.
Many of the laws the Creator inspired to be recorded concern relationships, family and the disparate roles of men and women. “[M]ale and female created he them,” Genesis 1:27 states, and the law makes plain that He did so with purpose and clear intent. Many details are recorded about sex roles, and passages such as Deuteronomy 22:5 show that differences between men and women are beautiful, and that the lines are not to be blurred.
Men and women have rejected God’s law since the Garden of Eden. That is why the world is dark with turmoil, murder and misery, and why so many today, particularly young people, are mired in confusion. If you are bogged down in confusion, discouragement, loneliness or perhaps even a desire to take your own life, you can put God to the test. His promise is that if you strive to obey Him, your life will begin anew. Your heaviness will lessen. Your life will be changed beautifully.