‘Former trans kid’ leads fight against gender ideology (Ft. Chloe Cole)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 11 minutes
Words per minute
130.40852
Harmful content
Misogyny
16
sentences flagged
Toxicity
1
sentences flagged
Hate speech
17
sentences flagged
Summary
Chloe Cole is a prominent trans activist from the US. She s become an activist on transgender issues, and is currently suing Kaiser hospitals in the US for pushing her into transitioning instead of properly treating her. She is an incredibly important and powerful voice in the gender ideology debate, and I am delighted to have her on the show.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, welcome to the Rupa Subramanya show. I'm Rupa Subramanya. I hope you're all
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doing well wherever you're tuning in from. Thank you once again for coming back to the show.
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Today I am joined by Chloe Cole. She's a very prominent detransitioner from the US.
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She's become an activist on transgender issues and currently suing Kaiser
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hospitals in the US for pushing her into transitioning instead of properly
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treating her. Hers is an incredibly important and powerful voice in the
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gender ideology debate. And I am absolutely delighted to have her on the show. Chloe,
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welcome. Welcome to the show. It's a real privilege to have you on on my show. I've
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been wanting to chat with you for a while. I've been following your journey for quite
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some time. So let's start by let me start by asking you more about your about your
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personal journey of transitioning and then de-transitioning. What was it like to realize
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that you wanted to de-transition and what challenges did you face during that process?
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I think it was probably the deepest pain I've ever experienced in my whole life.
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I was, it was something that I was in for years and I felt like I couldn't make my way out of it
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for the longest time. And upon realizing that I made the wrong choice and that there'd be permanent
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consequences to it, that I may never be able to have children of my own and my breasts are completely
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gone and I've had a huge part of my sexuality as a woman and a part of myself as an aspiring mother
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and would never be able to breastfeed. I think, and it's still something that still affects me to this day,
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it's still one of the most deeply painful realizations I've come to. And the way back from my transition
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hasn't been easy on the medical front or socially or emotionally. I haven't really gotten the appropriate
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care that I needed from any of my providers, any of the doctors who got me into the situation in the
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first place. And that includes my therapist. I've, I still have a lot of deep-seated trauma from
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going through what I did. And while it's been long enough that I've recovered fairly well from it,
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there's still a lot of things that I need help getting sorted with. And I just can't trust my
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healthcare provider with helping me with that anymore because I've tried, I've tried to reach
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out to them. And from each doctor, I've gotten a response that either wasn't helpful or it's made my
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situation worse. And I lost the transgender community after I decided to detransition.
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Just talking about my regret, they found it offensive. And they told me that my experience
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wasn't important, that it's not very common, so it's not significant. And just by talking about the
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pain and regret of transitioning, I was harming the transgender community because they said I was
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talking about experience and pushing it on other people. And in doing so, I was preventing people
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from getting the care that real transgender people needed. And so I was harassed and bullied until
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I stopped speaking about my experience for a while.
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Yeah. I mean, this is an extraordinary amount of stress and trauma for a young person to take.
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You're 18 now. So how old were you when you went on the path to transitioning? And at what age did you
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realize that you felt that you had made a horrible mistake? And, you know, what was that timeline like
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I was 12 years old when I started to identify as transgender. And shortly after, I started to do things
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like cutting my hair shorter, and taking on a new name as part of my new presentation and identity.
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And then, almost less than a year afterward, was when I was actually put on the treatments, which
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was PB blockers, and then testosterone, when I was 13 years old, and I was just into my eighth grade year.
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And I underwent a double mastectomy when I was 15 years old, right after my sophomore year of high
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school. And it wasn't even a year afterward, when I was 16, that I came to the realization that transition
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was causing more harm than it was doing me good.
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And what kind of harm, what was it doing to you? And for the layperson, you know, I count myself as one,
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things like puberty blockers, and these things sound, this sounds like very, very harsh medication.
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You know, what are the effects that this has on a young person's body?
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I mean, I'd say that these treatments were harmful for me in every way imaginable.
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They stunted my physical and sexual maturation, as well as my personal, emotional, social,
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Before I was put on the puberty blockers, the first endocrinologist I was referred to
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told me that I was too young to be put on these treatments, that he didn't know
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what kind of effects it might have on my development, and especially my brain development.
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But I wasn't told these concerns by any of the other doctors, and other doctors pushed it as
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the only treatment possible, the only thing that could treat my gender dysphoria.
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And they told my parents that there was no other option, that it couldn't wait until I was an adult,
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that it had to happen now. And if it didn't, then it would be very likely that I would kill myself.
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They told them that it was a life or death situation.
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But the blockers, the medication I took specifically was called Lupron.
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And I took it for about a year, and I had about three to four shots in total.
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And they work by suppressing the body's production of sex hormones.
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And historically, they've been used in children who have precocious puberty.
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I didn't know this until after I stopped taking them, but they've also been used in the past
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to sterilize sex offenders and in cancer treatments.
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And I was taking these treatments for a condition that was purely psychological.
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It was for the distress I had around my body that was treated as a life or death condition,
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So I was already a few years into taking blockers, so I had already started my period,
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I'd say maybe a year or less, before being put on it.
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And as part of the treatment, my menses would seize, but not before it would induce a very,
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very heavy period, about two weeks after the first shot.
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But because I was already into puberty, it basically induced a chemically artificial state of menopause.
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And so I was experiencing symptoms like hot flashes and itching all over my limbs and body.
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And even if this was something I was told about, I don't think it's something that
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you would really be prepared for until you actually experience it.
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Even, it was hard for me as a child, a 13 year old to take on something
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that women don't usually experience until they're in their late 40s to their early 60s.
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I was going through menopause when I was in eighth grade.
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I wanted to have my sex hormones back. I was very lethargic throughout the day.
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And the physical and psychiatric symptoms made it really difficult to focus on things like my schoolwork
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And so when I started on testosterone about a month later, I felt amazing because now my body,
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And I had my energy back and I had increased libido.
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And I was very confident just because of the, um, that's one of the psychiatric effects of testosterone.
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And I started having my voice drop and then the physical changes happening within a few weeks.
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I would say it was a very powerful drug and it was very dramatic.
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What were some of the physical changes that, uh, that, um, that, uh, you experienced, um,
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yeah, a month, you say a month into being on puberty blockers.
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Blockers, I didn't really have any physical changes per se, other than I was very lethargic and very sleepy.
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But the, the testosterone, um, the change in my voice happened very quickly and it dropped very deep.
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Throughout high school, I actually had a deeper voice than most of the boys my age and even some of my teachers.
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Um, but after that came the changes to like the shape of my face and my body, I started developing
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more muscle and my hair and eyebrows started to get thicker and my body hair and facial hair started
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And, um, I had a really bad body image disorder that went undiagnosed throughout the duration of my
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transition. And for a while being on testosterone resolved those feelings temporarily because now
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I was finally, I finally looked the way that I thought I wanted to. Before I transitioned,
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I thought that because I wasn't very curvy, because I was on the muscular, the skinny side,
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and because my breasts and hips weren't particularly developed, that I would never make a pretty woman,
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that there was no point in even trying. And that the reason why I looked more like a boy, I thought,
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was because I was supposed to be one. That somehow, I had the soul and the mind of a man.
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And that I wasn't supposed to be a girl. And that that was one of my signs. But
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after a while, as I started to progress through my transition and look more and more like a boy,
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as soon as I went into my freshman year, I actually looked like and was was perceived as by my peers as
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a boy. And it felt great being recognized as the person that I was identifying as,
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I mean, I, it was, it was really nice for a while, because I was bonding with other males.
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And I was making friendships and getting social opportunities that I didn't really have before.
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And so I thought that I was so I was so ugly that nobody would ever love me.
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So were you easily accepted by your, your male friends in school? Was that was that transition,
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for lack of a better word? Like, did you see that change for you dramatically? Did,
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were they easily accepting of the fact that you had, you were now one of them, so to speak?
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I mean, before, before I transitioned, I was mostly hanging out with other boys anyways.
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And I got along, I would say they were the people who I got along most with. But as I got older,
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and as we all started to hit puberty and go to go into middle school,
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the dynamics started to change, and I couldn't be as close to them as I wanted to. And now whenever
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I had a close relationship with a boy, it was expected that I would be in a relationship with him,
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or that they would, or they would end up developing feelings for me when I just wanted to be friends.
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And this change in dynamic was really difficult for me because growing up, I often thought of myself
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as being one with them. I didn't want anything more than that, for the most part. And
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it was, it was something that I was, growing up, really difficult for me to adjust to.
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And so having that sort of camaraderie back was, it made me really happy.
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And now there were girls who were developing crushes on me. And sometimes I would get girls
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like confessing their feelings to me. Other times, there were some not so pleasant experiences with
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them. Like I had girls who were, because I was a boy, they thought they could get away with like touching me,
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or like, trying to get me to like, hug them or kiss them, without me wanting to do so. And
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I think before I get into this, it's important to, for me, for me to mention that I had a fear of being sexually assaulted,
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and it actually ended up happening while I was transitioning. And it was an incident I had in
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eighth grade, where somebody who was bullying me throughout the school year actually went too far,
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and looked me in the eyes, and groped one of my breasts. And this was before I was making an effort
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to hide my chest. So they were visible. And that was what prompted me to start using
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a compression device called a binder to hide my breasts, because I didn't want that to happen
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ever again. And it just reaffirmed my belief that I had before that, in being a woman,
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I was being vulnerable, especially to things like this, and that I would be in danger. And I wanted
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to protect myself in doing so. But I didn't realize how much this sexual trauma played into my desire to
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transition. And unconsciously, part of my motivation to continue transitioning was to avoid being sexually
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assaulted ever again. But I actually experienced more sexual assault, while I was presenting and
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being perceived as a boy, than I ever did as a girl.
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Yeah, that's, that's extraordinary. And, you know, so you're on testosterone, you're supposed to feel
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some sense of euphoria. And then, but you're also experiencing these challenges, you know, as a person
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who's transitioned, you still have your breasts, you're still being perceived. I mean, I just, I just find
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it extraordinary that, you know, while you're transitioning, the social dynamics around you,
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that was also changing rapidly, right? The girls were interested in you, the boys saw you as one of
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them. And, but, but, but tell me, Chloe, like, how strong was, was the feeling of gender dysphoria?
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That, I mean, was it, I guess my question is, you know, why, why did the medical community,
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you know, these are people who are supposed to take care of you, they're supposed to do no harm?
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You know, why was it so easy for a doctor to just say and tell your parents that, that, you know,
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you, you, you were experiencing strong gender dysphoria, and that you had to be put on this
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transition, you had to put, be put on this path to transitioning?
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It wasn't always like this. I mean, previous decades, especially with children, they used to
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take the approach of just waiting and seeing how this condition progressed. And most of the time,
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children would grow out of this, this feeling. But neither me nor my parents were informed of this.
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And now the protocol is to incessantly affirm the feelings and whatever identity the patient has
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over actually looking into why they are feeling this way, why they don't want to associate with
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their own sex and the distress that this feeling might come from. And I live in California where they
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have a law banning conversion therapy, but in the definition of conversion therapy, they include
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gender identity. And if a doctor takes pretty much any other approach than affirming a patient's
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perceived gender identity, then they could lose their license, because that's considered conversion therapy.
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Mm hmm. So really, there was no other choice. It was a systemic failure all around.
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Yeah, it most certainly sounds like it. And why? I mean, I know, you know, beyond saying that it was
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systemic, it was systemic failure. What, what is it that the medical community gets out of, you know,
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what, what, what are they gaining from this? You know, how do they come out of this? How do they
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benefit from encouraging young people like you to go on puberty blockers and, and, and, and, you know,
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and get, you know, a mastectomy and so on? Is it money? Is there a commercial angle to this? What's,
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what's going on? Part of it is ideological. But it's also very profitable to put about to put a
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patient on these treatments, especially the younger you go, the younger you sterilize a child. And
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the more medications you put them on, the more surgeries they undergo, the more money you make
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off of them. And especially once they're on hormones long enough, or once they get their sex
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organs removed, their bodies are no longer capable of producing a healthy amount of sex hormones on
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their own anymore. So they'll be, they'll be dependent on pharmaceuticals for life. And that's
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not to mention that pretty much being on, on any of these treatments for an extended period of time
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will guarantee that you'll experience some sort of serious complication down the line.
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And more likely than not, they'll just prescribe you another medication for that.
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And that's what happened with me. I haven't gotten my fertility checked, but I've had my period start
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about two months after stopping testosterone. So I am hopeful that I'll be able to conceive,
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but I don't know how things like my egg quality while were affected while I was supposed to be developing
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or whether the lack of growth in my hips might affect my ability to vaginally birth. But
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I, I remember in one of my appointments with my endocrinologist,
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before I started on testosterone, she told me that I
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would probably experience something called vaginal atrophy down the line.
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And the way that was explained to me was that this is a condition that, um,
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due to the lack of estrogen in the body, the walls of the vagina start to atrophy, meaning that
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they get thinner over time. And this might make things like sex painful, and it might cause tearing or
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bleeding, but it could be addressed by taking topical estrogen. And that was the route that I went.
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I was 13 years old, and I wasn't sexually active yet, so I didn't really understand what any of this meant.
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And it wasn't explained to me that this atrophy wasn't affecting this one organ. It was actually
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the rest of the reproductive system and pretty much on the organs in the pelvic region.
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And eventually, I actually started to experience complications with my urinary tract as well,
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mostly UTIs, but also sometimes even like blood clots or clots of tissue in my urine.
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And I, in the same appointment, she also told me that
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being on the testosterone would probably affect my fertility as an adult, but I was still a kid.
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I wasn't thinking about having kids of my own. I didn't know how important that would be to myself
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yet. And so I just said, I'm fine with that. Because I didn't know how important that was to me.
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And fertility preservation wasn't presented as an option to me either. But I thought that,
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well, I mean, if I want to have kids of my own, then I could just do like IVF or surrogacy or something
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like that, because we already have technologies like that. But I didn't understand then that it's
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really not that simple. And that treatments like that come with a whole host of their own complications,
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especially for the child. And I was at an age where I didn't know yet what things like ovulation
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or cervix were yet. I didn't know what the fallopian tubes were. I didn't know that there were four stages
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in the menstrual cycle. All I knew was that there is a period, and that after and before it begins
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and stops, somehow I could get pregnant. And none of the adults who were supposed to help me understand
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the risk of these treatments helped me to understand any of this. Something that, by being on these
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treatments for an extended period of time, it would affect all those things.
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So, yeah, I mean, it's just hard for me to process what you're saying and what you've been through.
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It, it, it's just quite an extraordinary journey that you've been on and you continue to be on this.
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And, you know, and I want to talk a little bit about your activism. But before we get to that,
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you, you mentioned to me, you mentioned in some interviews that, that social media played a role
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in introducing the idea of transitioning to you. Can you tell us how this happened? I mean,
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how did, how did social media do this in shaping your understanding of your gender?
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I mean, throughout a lot of elementary school, I was getting bullied. I found it really difficult
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to socialize and get along with my peers and also to regulate myself emotionally.
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And after I moved neighborhoods, I was back to square one with having no friends and finding it difficult
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to build myself back up socially. And that was the same school year that my school district started
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to roll out devices, laptops for all the students. And they allowed, they allowed the students to take
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these devices home once they hit fifth grade. And they didn't really have any filters on these laptops
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for a few years. And so you could access pretty much any website you wanted to.
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And this sort of helped to foster the internet addiction that I had through a lot of my my childhood
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and adolescence. But I ended up getting my first phone when I was 11 years old. And most of my other
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peers already had one for a few years. And they were all using apps and websites like Instagram and Snapchat
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and kick. And I wanted to see what I was missing out on. So naturally, I started making my own social
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media accounts. And because I'd always been on the tomboyish side, there were a lot of I really like
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things like like video games and certain shows and comics and other media. And so the the communities
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that I browse on social media were mostly around those things. And I started noticing
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that some of the members in these communities would sometimes they would make posts that weren't
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really necessarily related to the media, but about their own personal lives. And a lot of these members
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were young people, preteens to people in their early 20s, who identified with LGBT. And many of them were
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transgender, young women, around my age, who identified as males.
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And just hearing them talk about the way they felt around their bodies, and themselves as women,
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I found it really relatable because growing up, I was a bit on the tomboyish side. And it was
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especially difficult for me to to fit in with other kids and other girls. And I always felt like
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there was something that was setting me apart from the other kids. And now it seemed like I had an
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explanation for this feeling, why I was so different from from the other girls.
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Why I didn't act like, or feel like, or I thought even look like the other girls.
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And, I mean, throughout a lot of my development, that was something that was a huge source of pain for me.
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And now I thought, I finally understood why. It was because I wasn't supposed to be one.
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Before I came to this conclusion though, I kind of switched between a few labels, mostly like around my sexuality.
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I thought that for a while, maybe I was bisexual, or maybe I was pansexual.
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And then eventually that became, well, maybe it's not my sexuality that's the issue.
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Maybe it's my gender because I've never totally felt like a girl. I don't even understand what
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that's supposed to mean. But, you know, I've always felt like I related more to my older brothers
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and my dad than I did my mom and my sisters. And I, the older I got, the less I wanted to associate
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Yeah, incredible. Because what you're describing is, you know, I went through that as a kid as well.
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And, you know, some of what you're saying, you know, I was very much a tomboy. I didn't really
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identify with girls. I didn't, mostly identified with male figures in my life. And I also partly
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grew up in the Middle East where, you know, that time it was very unsafe for girls to be on their
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own. And I experienced instances where men, you know, would try to touch you. And then I felt very
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vulnerable and ashamed of my, the fact that I was a woman. I thought that as a girl, that if I were a
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boy, nobody would touch me and I would be safe. And so I completely relate to what you're, you know,
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with some of the stuff that you're saying. And it's just, I often wonder, you know, what if this,
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this had been available to me at that time, you know, what would I have done? And I think, you know,
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I just, I obviously I grew out of it. And as I got older, I started identifying more with,
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you know, feminine things, but, but it is, you know, it is, I feel like it's, this is more common
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than, than people realize it is. Right. And you would think the medical profession would be aware
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of this, that, that this, this is, this is not a decision you can just make just on the fly. And
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that, you know, you, you get a patient who is identifying strongly, you know, and, and then,
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you know, it shouldn't be that easy to just then decide that this person is in need of this therapy.
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Having spoken to other women who haven't transitioned these feelings, especially when you're growing up
00:33:11.760
around the fear of being a woman or not wanting to grow up into a woman from a girl. Yeah.
0.82
00:33:23.920
It's pretty common and a lot, if not most women experienced that growing up. Yeah. And there's
00:33:29.440
a lot of women out there who have tomboy phases. Some never grow out of it, but that's okay because
1.00
00:33:35.120
yeah, it doesn't make them a man. It just makes them unique.
00:33:38.800
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I think part of what is missing from these
00:33:43.680
conversations is the fear of the challenges of being a girl, you know, challenges of, you know,
00:33:52.000
you know, being, being a girl, you know, when you're growing up and, you know, I'm sure boys have their
00:33:58.960
own challenges, but I feel like, you know, especially if you're a girl and you're growing up in a certain
00:34:03.600
kind of environment, you know, it's not easy. And I think that's completely missing from this
00:34:08.560
conversation, you know, or the conversations around gender dysphoria. We're not dealing with
0.78
00:34:22.400
I grew up thinking that being a woman was only being going to be difficult.
00:34:28.560
That there wasn't really in it. There wasn't really anything in it for me that I didn't want
00:34:35.120
to get pregnant. I didn't want to have children of my own that I didn't want to go through the process,
00:34:39.760
the painful process of pregnancy or childbirth or having periods every month and eventually
00:34:46.240
going through menopause and being judged for aging. I didn't see any benefit this because
00:34:55.040
what I would hear from other women would always downplay the importance
0.98
00:35:01.120
and the gifts that all of these things really bring, because even if you don't want to have
00:35:07.920
children of your own, that's still something that's the ability to create life is something
00:35:13.760
that's sacred. It should be celebrated. But it was nothing that
00:35:33.040
I often heard that boys have it easier, that boys are better, they're stronger, they're smarter,
00:35:39.520
they're faster, they're better in every way. And that the grass is greener on the other side. But
00:35:48.400
I mean, I'll never actually be a boy, of course, because I was born, I was conceived as a woman,
00:35:57.840
and no treatment could ever change that. But I mean, I passed quite well as the opposite sex.
00:36:06.880
And during that period of time in my life, I kind of got to have a glimpse at the hardships that men,
00:36:14.400
and especially young men face. And I feel like it can be a pretty lonely experience.
00:36:22.320
And while transitioning has caused irreversible harm to my body, and it's taken a lot of things for me that
0.99
00:36:36.080
I'll never get back. I think the one thing that I can appreciate about it is that it's really
00:36:50.080
to the difficulties that men face. And it's helped me to appreciate the men in my life.
00:36:56.080
So give me some examples. I mean, what did you, you know, learn about the difficulties that young men face?
00:37:06.400
Well, socially, the structure is quite a bit different.
00:37:15.680
There is a bit of a hierarchy that I found it difficult to, uh,
00:37:26.320
to move up in, because I wasn't raised as a boy. And I didn't, there were a lot of
00:37:31.040
social nuances that I didn't really pick up on for a while. Because I didn't know that these were
00:37:42.560
things that I was going to face. And, um, it's a lot more difficult to be intimate
00:37:51.520
with your peers, with your friends or your family. And there's a lot that's expected of you emotionally.
00:37:58.400
You're supposed to bottle your emotions up and just be a man and take things as they are.
00:38:05.440
And there's not really a whole lot, a whole lot of room to,
00:38:08.960
to talk about your personal hardships or what you're going through.
00:38:11.680
Yeah. Um, so Chloe, you've, I want to talk a bit about your activism, uh, against, uh, gender
0.51
00:38:22.560
affirming care. Uh, you've been very vocal in your opposition to gender affirming care for minors.
00:38:30.000
Um, uh, even testifying in favor of legislation that would limit such care. Uh, can you tell us,
00:38:36.400
can you tell us why, why you believe minors and their parents should not be able to consent
00:38:41.600
to such care? Um, I mean, I wouldn't really call it care, but I would say that gender affirming care is
00:38:56.160
very much a misleading term. It's neither a form of care nor is it gender affirming because
00:39:05.840
if it were affirming a person's gender, it would be helping them to become comfortable in their own
00:39:13.520
sex, in their body, and to discover the underlying causes beneath the gender dysphoria and what's
00:39:22.400
the possible traumas and other issues that this feeling stems from.
00:39:30.400
Um, because a lot of these patients, they have some sort, some form of either sexual trauma or familial
00:39:41.120
trauma. And a lot of it comes from very, very early childhood. And even knowing this,
00:39:51.200
these providers often don't go into this, but oftentimes they'll have this information on file
00:39:56.400
and they won't do anything about it. They'll just treat it as a completely standalone issue.
00:40:03.200
But in psychology, I don't think that there's any part of the mind that isn't interconnected with the
00:40:09.600
rest. But about a year after I stopped transitioning, I decided that I started to,
00:40:21.200
to want speaking up. I started, I decided that I wanted to start speaking up about my experience,
00:40:27.040
having been through the process of transitioning and eventually detransitioning as a kid. And
00:40:35.520
my motivations in doing so were that I wanted to expose the transgender community and how
00:40:51.760
it takes vulnerable children and young adults and how it treats the people whose transitions are a
00:40:59.280
failure. But I also, um, wanted to highlight the experiences of children who have been through this
00:41:07.920
process. Because at the time I was active in communities online that were focused on detransition,
00:41:16.080
but most of the people in these communities were grown adults who had been through the process of
00:41:22.320
transitioning medically as adults. There weren't any children that I knew of at the time, but I knew that
00:41:32.480
if this happened to me, this must be happening to at least hundreds, if not thousands of other children.
00:41:42.320
But we might never know if nobody ever speaks up about it. And I felt the responsibility
00:41:47.760
to take that upon myself because I don't want what happened to me to happen ever again to any other
00:41:56.400
child, because this is never an appropriate treatment for children ever.
00:42:01.680
Yeah. No, you're doing extraordinary work in, uh, you know, in, and being a voice, uh, to,
00:42:07.680
for those who can't speak up and, um, you know, I, you know, I, you know, really, um, admire your courage,
00:42:15.920
uh, and as do a lot of people, um, I, I believe you're in a lawsuit right now. Um, how does your
00:42:22.240
experience with the medical system relate to the lawsuit that you filed? Can you tell us a bit about
00:42:27.440
that? Right. So I'm suing my healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, as well as my doctors, including my
00:42:38.000
surgeon who removed my breasts, my endocrinologist, my, my endocrinologist who put me on hormones and
00:42:43.360
blockers and the gender specialists who referred me to the surgery. And we're suing on the basis of
00:42:54.800
medical malpractice and fraud because they not only gave me the atrogenic treatments that caused me
00:43:04.240
harm. These treatments also failed to address, failed to resolve my gender dysphoria, and they
00:43:11.920
failed to diagnose the underlying causes beneath my gender dysphoria. And they lied to my parents that
00:43:18.960
there was no other option that these treatments would be beneficial in the long run, that if
00:43:26.320
I wasn't put on them, it was very likely that I would die. I would die from being unable
00:43:34.320
to transition. And we were withheld a lot of important information about these treatments
00:43:47.920
Did you, I mean, when, when the doctor is saying this to your parents, did your parents at any point,
00:43:53.360
like, or you, I mean, did you exhibit any suicidal tendencies for example?
00:43:57.520
No, no, I wasn't suicidal until after I started transitioning. And I don't believe I was in the
00:44:04.080
room for this either. I think this is an appointment that my parents were having one-on-one with the
00:44:08.720
doctors. I didn't know that was said until after I stopped transitioning and I had a conversation with
00:44:15.280
my parents about it. Wow. So you found out about this much later when, when, when, in fact, I would,
00:44:22.240
I would think that the, you know, of course, you know, hindsight is always 20-20 and, you know,
00:44:27.760
you can't go back into the past and change any of this stuff. But I would think that the obvious
00:44:32.560
question to you is Chloe, I mean, are, do you, do you feel like, do you have suicidal tendencies because
00:44:37.840
of the gender dysphoria that you're experiencing? And that would be an obvious question to ask someone
00:44:44.800
who's experiencing this, right? But was that, was that ever, did they ever, part of the psychiatric
00:44:51.360
evaluation that you had to undergo? Was that, was that a question that was ever posed to you?
00:44:58.480
I believe so. I mean, it was five or six years ago, so it's really quite difficult to remember. But, um,
00:45:12.000
from what I can remember, the process of my diagnosis wasn't thorough enough. They
00:45:25.920
had on file that I previously had a diagnosis of ADHD that I had some very strong symptoms of autism
00:45:34.960
and other, and that I had social difficulties and that I had symptoms of a body image disorder.
00:45:46.640
But none of this was ever taken into consideration during the diagnosis or the treatment for my gender dysphoria.
00:45:54.320
Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I know we, we say systemic failure, but I feel like there's something more, uh,
00:46:07.120
insidious happening here. Um, and, um, and what, what do you expect, uh, to, um, to get out of this lawsuit?
00:46:15.200
What is the message that you're trying to send, um, if, if the lawsuit, uh, goes your way?
00:46:24.480
I want to stop other doctors from ever performing these treatments on children ever again.
00:46:30.720
And I hope that in doing this, that I can create a precedent for other detransitioners and other people
1.00
00:46:39.200
who regret or have been harmed by these treatments to get the justice and care that they need for themselves.
00:46:48.880
Yeah. Uh, you, you mentioned, you've talked about your parents, uh, in other interviews and, you know,
00:46:54.640
you, you've made it very clear that you don't blame them and that they were under intense social pressure
00:47:00.480
to consent to the treatment and the surgery. Um, what, what do you think parents, um, you know,
00:47:07.120
who are listening, uh, to this, you know, um, you know, what, what do you think the role of parents
00:47:12.720
in these decision decisions should be? Uh, and what, what, what do you think should be done to support them?
00:47:23.200
It's a really difficult thing to hear about your child coming from these, these doctors,
00:47:34.560
these people who should be the professionals in the situation, who you should be able to trust that if
00:47:44.800
you don't let your child make this life altering decision,
00:47:48.720
then their blood is going to be on your own hands as a parent.
00:47:54.720
But these doctors are basically using emotional manipulation tactics,
00:48:01.840
tactics, tactics employed by abusers, to dupe these parents into letting their kid
00:48:10.240
create the own course, create the course of their own treatment.
00:48:13.520
And when it comes down to it, this whole thing is based on lies and pseudoscience.
00:48:31.200
you have to, um, be logical while also being emotionally available to your children,
00:48:38.800
letting them know that you love them as they are, that the issue is not their bodies or the way that
00:48:46.160
they were born. It's the way that they perceive their body in their own mind. And that is what needs
00:48:52.960
to change, not the way that they look, not the way that their form is, but how they feel about it.
00:49:08.800
you have to uphold reality and you can't affirm your child's perceived identity.
00:49:16.640
I think it's abuse to let a child believe that they were in fact born in the wrong body,
00:49:22.160
that this isn't the way that they're supposed to be.
00:49:23.840
And it's been established for years and you don't need to be an expert to understand that
00:49:36.240
you're born either male or female and that nothing can change that and that there's nothing wrong with
00:49:42.720
that. We're born the way that we're meant to be. God made us the way we are for a reason.
00:49:47.840
And that's okay. That's beautiful. And it's to be appreciated. And these differences between men and
00:49:56.400
women are to be celebrated because we're not rivals or counterparts.
0.97
00:50:03.360
Yeah. And that truly would be gender affirming in a real sense.
00:50:07.040
You know, I want to ask you about the process of detransitioning. We know what transitioning involves.
00:50:19.920
What happens when you stop taking these drugs, these injections? You know, what is your body going through
00:50:29.360
I didn't really get any guidance on how I should have went off of hormones. So I pretty much just
00:50:42.640
went off in the cold turkey. It was just one final shot, no tapering of doses. I just couldn't stand
00:50:51.120
taking those medications anymore and seeing how it was changing my body and me as a person.
00:50:59.360
But going off of it cold turkey presented a lot of difficulty for me.
00:51:09.360
Both in terms of my physical and mental health, it became really difficult to regulate myself
00:51:16.880
emotionally because of the extreme hormonal imbalance in my body. And I would have really
00:51:25.280
severe episodes. And I think emotionally that was rock bottom for me. That was the worst I'd ever been
00:51:36.160
in my life. And it was really difficult for me to get out of. And it was affecting all my relationships.
00:51:42.080
I pretty much didn't have any friends by the time that I was in my senior year.
00:51:45.360
And physically, it made me really sickly. I had a lot of colds. I didn't really have much
00:51:59.120
in the way of an appetite. So I dropped about 20-25 pounds within two months. And I became underweight.
00:52:09.360
And the UTI-like symptoms started to worsen for a while. And that was when the tissue
00:52:20.480
started to appear in my urine. And it's since disappeared. I've tried to reach out to
00:52:25.040
like an OBGYN, a EuroGYN to try and figure out what was going on with my body. But they didn't respond
00:52:35.040
quickly enough. And it was hard to get a physical appointment with these people. And they often just
00:52:43.200
like made diagnosis that were pretty much just assumptions over email based off of my symptoms
00:52:52.560
without really any sort of examination. And so I was prescribed antibiotics, or I was recommended
00:53:00.080
to take some other medication. But they never really got to the root cause of whatever this was. And so I
00:53:12.720
just, I guess, because now that it's gone, now that it's resolved, I'll never know.
00:53:17.200
Yeah. And my having reached out to my gender specialists, I just found like I wasn't really
00:53:29.440
getting any help psychologically. And at one point, she even told me like that this regret
00:53:37.600
I had from transitioning was just another part of my gender journey. Absolutely disgusting,
1.00
00:53:43.120
just totally dismissive of everything that I'd been through. And my surgeon, um, I reached out to
00:53:50.800
because for almost a year now, as of now, I've had this serious complication from the skin grafts that
00:54:02.320
they used in my mastectomy. They've started to leak fluid, and I have to wear bandages over my chest
00:54:08.080
every day because of this. And it won't stop. And I have no idea what it is. I've tried to, I got an
00:54:15.920
appointment with him. And the whole time he was very dismissive of me and my concerns. And his advice
00:54:24.560
was just to put Vaseline on the wound and keep covering it with bandages. And in doing so, it actually
00:54:30.400
caused me to have a skin infection. And that was the last time I went to him. I just can't bring myself
00:54:42.640
to go back. I can't trust that any of these people are going to help me now.
00:54:47.680
Is that, is your experience, uh, de-transitioning and, you know, and this, this kind of care, um,
00:54:54.640
which is not really care, uh, is that, is that, uh, uh, uh, representative of, uh,
00:55:00.400
the experiences of other de-transitioners that they, you know, they're experiencing these issues
00:55:05.360
and they, they're not really getting the help that they need, uh, to deal with it?
00:55:11.520
Um, yeah, I mean, I've spoken to a lot of other de-transitioners, um, and this seems to be a pretty
1.00
00:55:18.800
common theme in that after stopping transition, you pretty much just get put, kicked to the side
00:55:27.200
by your own doctors who helped you to get these treatments. And they pull a complete 180 on you
00:55:36.000
saying like, oh, well, we don't really have any, any data on patients like you or, oh, I've never had
00:55:42.560
a patient like you. So I'm either not sure how to treat you or I'm just going to outright refuse to
00:55:50.000
treat you. Um, and I mean, there's no codes in place in healthcare for people who stop transitioning
00:55:59.840
or regret their transition or have had some sort of complication from these treatments.
00:56:06.160
So there's nothing for doctors to really abide by when deciding how to treat us.
00:56:13.040
I want to ask you a question about your, uh, activism. Um, you know, you've, um, aligned yourself
00:56:20.160
with some would say some controversial figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Um, can you tell us
00:56:26.160
why you chose to work with these individuals and, um, and you know, as, as a young person,
00:56:32.560
what, what is it like to navigate these political landscapes for you?
00:56:39.840
I don't necessarily share all the views of people I work with, but I'll work with anybody
00:56:48.240
who's willing to stand against the mutilation and sterilization and abuse of thousands of children,
00:56:54.960
whether they're Democrats or Republicans or on the left or on the right. It doesn't matter to me because
00:57:02.880
well, I guess you'd say that politics would be the water in which I'll say I'll sail my ship.
00:57:14.080
Yeah. It's not an issue that is political. It's been politicized. The left has managed to make it a
00:57:21.840
political issue, but at heart, this is about children and it's about family and upholding reality.
00:57:30.560
And that's something that anybody should stand for no matter whatever side they're on.
00:57:37.200
Well, it's something that will affect all of us. And it is.
00:57:40.320
Yeah. And what is the appropriate age according to you for someone to transition or do you believe
00:57:44.880
that transitioning per se should just be banned? What if you're say 22, 23 years old or something,
1.00
00:57:51.600
you're an adult and you decide that, you know, I've given this enough time, I'm still,
00:57:58.480
you know, feeling a strong gender dysphoria. I, and I think I'm an adult now and I am an adult now.
00:58:06.160
So I'm going to do this. What would you say to that? I mean, you oppose, clearly you oppose it for
00:58:14.160
children, but what, what about adults and what age do you think you have to be to make that kind of
00:58:24.160
Um, I don't think it's ever appropriate for anybody under the age of 18, but I think
0.65
00:58:32.720
even for those under the age of 25 it's for most people, it's not going to be an appropriate choice
00:58:45.840
for them to be able to make because you're still quite young. And I think in order to make a decision
00:58:55.840
on this, because this is going to affect every single area of your life. And it's going to affect
00:59:00.640
the way that you experience your family, your familial, romantic, sexual, platonic, and work
00:59:08.720
relationships. It's going to affect the way that you experience sexuality down to the way that you
00:59:16.400
experience orgasms or sexual attraction and your fertility and the way that you think and socialize.
00:59:26.320
that of somebody who is so young. It takes a lot of experience in the world. A lot of years lived.
00:59:37.440
And knowledge, not only around these topics, but around things like family and having children.
00:59:47.440
And I don't think that for most people under the age of 25 that they'll be able to make a decision
00:59:59.360
on this with informed consent. It takes a lot. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to
01:00:08.400
be a certain age. As soon as you turn 18 you can transition. It takes a lot of
01:00:12.560
a lot of introspection and a lot of proper psychological evaluation to be able to make this choice.
01:00:25.520
gender dysphoria is accompanied by childhood familial or sexual trauma or learning disorders or other
01:00:42.080
conditions such as autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, social anxiety, body image disorders,
01:00:49.680
cluster B personality disorders, and the list goes on.
01:00:55.440
Yeah. You know, you touched upon something earlier in the conversation we spoke about,
01:01:02.560
you know, what is the motivation here? Is it commercial? And you said, I think it's commercial,
01:01:08.000
but it's also ideology. What is this ideology? I mean, what, again, is the end goal of this ideology?
01:01:15.680
Like when I think about ideology, like I'm thinking of communism, for example,
01:01:20.400
it has a very specific goal. What is the ideology here at play? You know, and what are they hoping to
01:01:27.680
achieve by creating a population of transgender people? You know, what is to be gained?
01:01:36.960
I think it's just another part of the breakdown of family and the devaluation of men and women in their
01:01:50.480
natural roles. While gender ideology supposedly seeks to make gender expression more open and to not enforce
01:02:03.680
gender roles by encouraging transition in individuals who are just naturally gender conforming. You're
01:02:15.040
pretty much strictly adhering to those gender roles by saying, on one hand, there are no differences between
01:02:21.440
the sexes. But on the other hand, those differences are so vast that
01:02:25.520
that if you're not completely like, if you don't act or behave completely as expected of your sex,
01:02:36.560
that you're actually of the other sex. But you'll notice that a lot of these children who identify as
01:02:47.280
transgender, many of them are not particularly close with their own parents. Not only are they gender
0.51
01:02:57.360
non-conforming, which I don't think is a bad trait in itself. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you
01:03:04.960
are of the other sex. But a large part of it for me, and a lot of my friends who were trans, I think,
01:03:14.560
was that both of our parents, our mothers and our fathers were in the working force. And so our mothers
01:03:25.920
didn't really have much time, were very busy. They didn't have very much time to spend with their own
01:03:33.760
children and foster that sort of connection at home, which is very important for a developing child.
01:03:41.600
And a lot of parents now, in general, they're not really as engaged in the lives of their own
01:03:53.120
children now. They're often very tired from work. And so they're more interested in, say, watching TV,
01:04:04.000
or spending time with other adults or resting. But they don't really make time
01:04:09.040
time to spend with their own children. And they're letting the screen parent their own kid.
01:04:16.160
And because of that, their kids are getting exposed to content such as pornography,
01:04:23.760
which is indicated in a lot of girls' body image disorders, as well as these online communities that
1.00
01:04:33.200
are seemingly innocent, but are breeding grounds for things like sexual grooming, or in my case,
01:04:44.560
the transgender community. I wasn't directly exposed to the transgender community at first.
01:04:52.080
It happened for me through fan bases around video games and cartoons that I liked.
01:05:01.360
It's very subtle, but a lot of the internet can be a very dangerous place, especially for somebody
01:05:08.880
who has a mind that's still developing. And there's that sort of generational difference
01:05:14.640
that a lot of older people really aren't aware of.
01:05:19.360
I mean, it's even, you know, it's even bad for adults, I think. I mean, it's a dangerous place,
01:05:28.800
even for, you know, I sometimes get sucked into a certain kind of thinking because of something that
01:05:35.280
I've viewed on Twitter, or, you know, in a certain kind of, in a certain world, and it gets sucked into
01:05:43.280
that world. So it, you know, just imagine what it would be for a young person. Yeah, right. It's,
01:05:49.280
it's easy, especially when you have an impressionable, an impressionable mind, you get sucked into some
01:05:54.800
sort of ideology. Right. I mean, in a lot of these spaces, there is a lot of antinatalist,
01:06:03.360
anti-mother, anti-parenthood, anti-family ideology. And that was part of what affected my view of what
01:06:11.040
being a woman would be like, because it was like, a lot of the feminist dogma that I was being exposed
1.00
01:06:17.840
to on websites like Instagram and Tumblr, would talk about how painful the female experience is,
1.00
01:06:25.920
how horrific and useless things like pregnancy and childbirth were. And sometimes they would even
01:06:32.960
describe the fetus in the mother's womb as some sort of parasite that was just feeding off of the
01:06:43.120
body of the mother, rather than a symbiotic relationship. And things like that made it very,
01:06:54.640
very, it made me very, very afraid of becoming a woman and eventually experiencing those things for
01:06:59.440
myself. The terminology that they would use, the way, the horrific, disgusting way that they would
01:07:08.640
describe processes like pregnancy, and even just being a mother in general, it was very, very anti-woman.
01:07:18.480
And it would often, a lot of it would sort of ridicule, not only these processes,
01:07:25.360
but mothers and their own, their own families, and the traditional role of the woman.
1.00
01:07:38.800
even being feminine, doing things like shaving, or wearing makeup, or just going out and presenting
01:07:47.520
yourself femininely. I had a lot of shame around these things because I was actually very hyper-feminine
01:07:55.200
when I was a very young child. And I actually got bullied for it a little bit by boys. And so I
01:08:01.600
stopped presenting that way. And seeing stuff like that further reinforced it. It told me that,
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no, I shouldn't be this way. I shouldn't want to be girly or a mother.
01:08:13.600
Yeah, well, I can completely relate to that. You know, a final question for you,
01:08:19.760
Chloe, because I know you, you know, you're, you're very busy and, and you need to get to other things.
01:08:26.960
You know, since you've begun speaking, speaking up, and, you know, and, you know, and through your
01:08:33.440
activism, how do, have, you know, has there been a growing community of D transitioners who've come to
01:08:41.440
you and, and, you know, and spoken to you about their own experiences? And, you know, do they, I'm sure
01:08:48.800
they see you as a role model, but you know, what, you know, what's next for you?
01:08:56.400
Yeah, I, since I've started speaking out, I've met a lot of other D transitioners, especially
0.55
01:09:06.560
other girls who have been through the medical transition process, while they were still children,
01:09:12.720
adolescents. And there's been a few people who've told me like, thank you so much for speaking up,
01:09:18.480
like you've helped me to, to garner the courage to be able to speak out about my own experience.
01:09:26.400
And I've actually met quite a few of these people in person, and it's been, it's been a wonderful
01:09:34.160
experience. And I'm really, I'm really thankful that I've, that I had, that I even had this opportunity to
01:09:41.600
not only talk about my own experience and advocate for other people in the situation, but to meet other
01:09:50.320
people who know this pain and to foster each other's growth and to help everybody heal from this.
01:10:00.400
Yeah. I mean, that's extraordinary. You're doing that at, at the age of 18. And, you know, I know,
01:10:06.800
I know these decisions, I know what's, what's happened to you, you know, is irreversible in some
01:10:13.680
sense. And, but I, but hopefully through your activism and you speaking out, you're not just a
01:10:19.520
role model for people in the de-transitioning community. I think you're a role model for everybody,
01:10:24.560
really. And I, I, you know, including, including for someone like me, I, you know, I just applaud your
01:10:32.320
courage and, you know, for speaking out on a very emotional and complex issue. You're wise beyond,
01:10:38.560
beyond your years. And, and I, you know, and I just wish you all the very best for whatever is coming up
01:10:45.200
next. Good luck with the lawsuit. And I really want to thank you for coming on to the show and sharing
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your experience, your very powerful experience with us. And I hope you'll be back on again soon.
01:10:58.480
Thank you very much. Thank you. You take care. You too.