Everyone needs to hear this 17-year-old’s story of transition and detransition

By Billy Hallowell, Editor, FaithWire
July 11, 2022

From https://www.faithwire.com/2022/07/11/ex-trans-teen-shares-heartbreaking-testimony-i-wasnt-capable-of-understanding/

A teenager from California who was born female but identified as male before changing course and returning to her biological gender is speaking out about her experience — and her heartbreaking story.

Chloe Cole, 17, reportedly defended the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration’s Rule 59G-1.050 that would deny Medicaid coverage for various interventions to help transgender individuals on their journey to achieve their preferred identity.

The rule would block those on the low-income insurance from receiving hormone therapy and puberty-blocking drugs. Supporters argue there is no evidence that these procedures are safe. They also challenge the idea these services are medically necessary, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.

Cole spoke at a rowdy Friday hearing alongside the rule’s supporters and detractors, sharing her tragic story and explaining her efforts to transition to identifying as a male, which began when she was 13.

She has since reversed course and is reportedly trying to help others see the confusion she faced and the residual pain.

“I really didn’t understand all the ramifications of any of the medical decisions I was making,” she said. “I wasn’t capable of understanding.”

Cole took testosterone and puberty-blocking drugs and even had surgery to remove her breasts, telling the panel how her actions between the ages of 13 and 16 were in some ways irreversible.

She said she realized she was on a path she shouldn’t have taken but that it was too late to change some of her actions. Now, Cole wonders if she will be able to have children and struggles with the realization she won’t ever be able to breastfeed.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to fully carry a child, and I might be at increased risk for certain cancers, mainly cervical cancer,” Cole told Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, according to footage he released on Twitter. “And because I do not have my breasts. I no longer have breasts … I am not able to breastfeed whatever future children I have.”

She continued, “That realization, actually, was one of the biggest things that led to me realizing that this was not the path that I should have taken.”

Cole encouraged parents not to transition their children, telling Fox News that kids should wait until they are adults to make such decisions. She warned of the damage transitioning can pose to the body and mind, perfectly summarizing these views in her testimony.

“No child should have to experience what I have,” Cole said.

The teen took to Twitter Sunday to encourage people who have de-transitioned to speak about their experiences.

“The best thing all of us can do is continue to speak out,” she said. “Especially to local, state, and federal government. That’s how we will beat this.”

You can watch Cole’s full testimony here. A final determination on Rule 59G-1.050 has not yet been made.

Cole is among a growing group of ex-transgender individuals who are openly revealing their experiences in hopes people understand the damaging impact transitioning has had on their lives.

There have even been reports of increases in sex-change regret, though some in the media are remiss in covering these reports. Continue to pray for Cole and others who are bravely sharing their stories.

Extracted from FaithWire.

Sinéad Watson is a healthcare advocate for youth experiencing gender dysphoria and an advisor for the Gender Dysphoria Alliance. She describes herself on the site as “detrans” and “detransitioned” and someone who desires to work toward “balanced, evidence-based care for gender questioning youth.”

Watson’s thread is an open letter that she penned to Stanford aimed at one of the premier medical doctors in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, Dr. Jack Turban, a chief fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and is well known for his research on transgender youth.

Full transcript from her Twitter post:

I am writing to you on behalf of a group of detransitioned women regarding your fellow Dr Jack Turban. We are deeply concerned with Dr Turban’s disparagement of psychiatric intervention and exploratory psychotherapy, his singular endorsement of affirmative therapies for people with gender dysphoria, and his dismissive and derogatory treatment of those of us who detransitioned due to transition regret.

We are but a few of many that have been the victims of this type of cavalier attitude. We all suffered from gender dysphoria at one point (and some still do), and were led to believe that our best chance of treating our dysphoria was to medically transition. As it turned out, this was not the case. As a result, we now have to live with bodies and voices that have been irreversibly changed (in some cases damaged) by hormones and surgeries, when what we needed was a compassionate and thoughtful exploration of our gender distress through talk therapy. Some of us will now never be able to have children and many of us live with great distress and regret every day.

Not only did physicians like Dr Turban fail us by sending us down a singular path of transition, they are now letting us down once again by disparaging our experiences and even our existence, when they should be providing us with support to help us heal from our unnecessary medical transitions. The fact that Dr Turban is a psychiatrist at Stanford and uses his credentials to promote his reckless approach is especially troubling, as he has been granted a large and influential media platform. As we see more and more distressed young people following in our footsteps of a rushed medical gender transition, in a few years, we fear that the consequences of Dr Turban’s activism will be catastrophic and visible to all.

Dr Turban does not hide his disregard for the role of psychotherapy in treating gender distress, and his singular belief in medical and surgical approaches to treating gender dysphoria, whatever its cause may be. Appearing on the GenderGP Podcast episode ‘Exploring Detransition with Dr Jack Turban’ (2021), hosted by Dr Helen Webberley, a UK physician criminally-convicted for running an illegal clinic, Dr Turban says:

“There’s no psychiatric intervention for gender dysphoria. There are medical interventions for gender dysphoria, if you will. And it’s not the rule like right, how the psychiatrist’s going to treat gender dysphoria, they’re not like they’re not going to make that go away. The only way that it’s ever been proposed that psychiatry can do that was through conversion therapy, which obviously doesn’t work:”

As you will read later in this letter, many detransitioners report that they strongly wish they had received exploratory psychotherapy rather than affirmation, thus Dr Turban’s insinuation that this would be tantamount to conversion therapy is highly disturbing. Dr Turban describes detransition, in the GenderGP podcast, as having “become this really awful word. I feel like 90% of the time when you read it, it’s really being weaponized.” The claim that discussing detransition is problematic due to the topic being “weaponized” has been used to shame, bully and silence detransitioners who try to tell our stories. This bullying of a vulnerable group is unacceptable, and we find it incredibly worrying that Dr Turban would participate in the accusation that detransition is “being weaponized,” furthering the bullying of detransitioned individuals.

This is not only a matter of rhetoric. Dr Turban goes on to say, in the podcast,

“When you say detransition people usually think that means like transition regret. It brings up this idea that somebody transitioned, then realize like, oh my god, that was a huge mistake. I’m actually cisgender, I regret every domain of gender affirmation I’ve ever had. And as I’m sure you know, that’s not the reality of the situation.”

Dr Turban is, again, completely dismissing those of us who have experienced transition regret. As detransitioned woman, we are deeply hurt that Dr Turban would find it appropriate to suggest that our pain and distress is not a reality. We do, in fact, regret every domain of gender affirmation we ever had and the irreversible changes that medical transition did to us that we must now live with for the rest of our lives. It is, therefore, highly unprofessional and deeply offensive to see comments like this from a fellow at Stanford.

At the same time as Dr Turban dismisses our existence, he also claims to represent us in research, but his bias is clear: the goal is to minimize detransition because it contradicts Dr. Turban’s professional aspirations to promote transgender medical and surgical interventions. In the GenderGP podcast he also says

“We have a paper that hopefully is coming out soon, where we took the data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey. So this was a survey of over 27,000 transgender adults in the United States. And we found that of those who had transitioned in some way, don’t quote me on that exact number, but it’s something like 13% of them said that at some point in their life they had detransitioned. And when we looked at why they did that the vast majority of them like close to 90% I think had detransitioned due to some external factor.”

We bring to your attention that the 2015 USTS survey that Dr Turban repeatedly uses for his research is an online convenience survey that was promoted by transition advocacy sites. We believe in and support transgender rights and trans people, but respectfully submit that this survey, subtitled “Injustice at Every Turn” which is full of biased questions that promote a political agenda, serves as a poor base for respectable research. Dr Turban previously attempted to use this survey to claim that psychotherapy leads to suicide; his problematic analysis and conclusions were thoroughly outlined in a rebuttal by Roberto D’Angelo et al. in ‘One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) to which Dr.Turban never replied, even through he had the chance to do so. Instead, Dr Turban attacked the researchers on Twitter. Dr Turban also used the same survey to attempt to show that puberty blockers saved lives. Another rebuttal showed just how flawed that piece of research was. See ‘Puberty Blockers and Suicidality in Adolescents Suffering from Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) by Michael Biggs.

Dr Turban failed to respond to that critique in the scientific area, but did go on media circuit to promote his deeply flawed conclusions. Most recently, Dr Turban misused this problematic sample to discredit detransition experiences in his research, ‘Factors Leading to “Detransition” Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis’ (2021). Dr. Turban did not seem at all troubled by the fact that 100% of the respondents were transgender-identified and did not identify as detransitioners. This is an expert from his study:

“These [detransition due to internal factors] experiences did not necessarily reflect regret regarding past gender affirmation, and were presumably temporary, as all of these respondents subsequently identified as TGD, an eligibility requirement for study participation.”

Dr. Turban’s conclusions were that detransition is largely a temporary phenomenon, happens in response to external pressures, and does not really represent a problem for those who detransitioned. These conclusions are highly flawed and ignore those of us who have detransitioned due to transition regret, and who were excluded from the survey for no longer being transgender-identified. In comparison, recent detransition research conducted within the actual detransition community – (‘Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey’ (2021) by Elie Vandenbussche) found very different results: that most of us detransition due to the internal realization that transition was not what we needed, that transition did not help and- can actually make things worse for us, and that we found other non-invasive ways to alleviate our dysphoria. Further, the research showed that detransitioners expressed the need to find alternative treatments to deal with their gender dysphoria, but reported that it was nearly impossible to talk about it within LGBT+ spaces and in the medical sphere. Vandenbussche found that most detransitioners currently are in dire need of psychological support on matters such as gender dysphoria, co-morbid conditions, feelings of regret, social/physical changes and internalized homophobic or sexist prejudices. The research confirmed that detransitionres experience prejudice when working with medical and mental health systems, which Dr. Turban’s vocal activism directly emboldens and reinforces.

We feel it important to add that in May 2021, the Karolinska Hospital in Sweden issued a new policy statement regarding the treatment of gender-dysphoric minors. This policy has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under the age of 18. Finland also revised its treatment guidelines in June 2020, prioritizing psychological interventions and support over medical interventions. Major changes are also underway in the UK as the NHS has convened a Cass Review to examine the practice of transition for young people and the evidence that underlies it. Thus, it seems evident that there is a growing concern over the proliferation of medical interventions that have a low certainty of benefits, while carrying a significant potential for severe medical harm.

It is worrying that Dr Turban does not seem to demonstrate the professional curiosity to rethink his endorsement of medical transition for minors and his dismay at psychotherapy and its role in the care of gender dysphoric individuals of all ages. We are also very concerned by Dr Turban’s activism to suppress the debate on the proper care for gender dysphoria in the public arena. On May 25, 2021, Dr Turban tweeted the following:

“When I spoke with @60Minutesabout their “detransition” story and asked where they found the people to profile – they refused to tell me and became defensive. We still don’t know if they searched for people on TERF forums, and transparency would be appreciated.”

We bring to your attention that TERF (acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”) is a pejorative term, and that Dr Turban’s use of it to smear and dismiss the experiences of the detransitioners who appeared on 60 Minutes is incredibly hurtful. That a fellow at Stanford would criticise 60 Minutes for having a brief segment featuring detransitioners has many of us very concerned that, should one of his patients experience transition regret and subsequently decide to detransition, Dr Turban would be unfit to help them due to his hostility towards the subject. Therefore we are concerned with how Dr Turban may practice as a clinician, specifically how he may treat a transgender person struggling with regret or a detransitioner seeking to discuss their regret or reverse their transition. His comments on the GenderGP podcast, his flawed use of the USTS, and his hostility towards any discussion of transition regret are all highly problematic and in need of addressing.

We ask Stanford to speak out for more thoughtful approaches because as it stands now, Stanford appears to be silently endorsing Dr Turban’s harmful claims that exploratory psychotherapy is tantamount to conversion therapy and that hormones and surgeries are the only appropriate treatment for people with gender dysphoria. Detransitioners and transition regret exist.

END

Nicole Russell / February 09, 2021 / Daily Signal

Children “have been very seriously damaged” in receiving treatment at the United Kingdom’s premier gender identity facility, a former psychiatrist there says in a bombshell interview.

Dr. David Bell faced disciplinary action after writing an internal report in 2018 raising concerns about procedures at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which operates the U.K.’s sole “Gender Identity Development Service.”

After working with Tavistock and Portman for 24 years as a consultant psychiatrist, Bell recently retired. In the interview with London-based Channel 4 News, he speaks openly about his observations about giving children puberty blockers, treating every girl with a gender or sexual issue as “conversion therapy,” and politicizing support for transgender children.

Right away, Bell isn’t shy about relating the concerns of parents and others about Tavistock’s treatment plans. He tells reporter Cathy Newman:

I was a representative of the clinical and academic staff. The concerns that were brought to me were very, very serious. The main concerns were issues that had to do with … lack of consent. Many of the people who spoke to me did not think their children were able to consent to the treatment.

Then there were concerns of children being inappropriately pushed through to transition, where they had a lot of complex problems that really needed thinking about. The whole attitude of what’s called ‘affirmation’ instead of neutrality and inquiry caused considerable damage to the capacity of the service and clinicians to take on the full complexities of the cases they were dealing with. As a result, children have been very seriously damaged.

Newman asks the psychiatrist in the interview whether children are at risk while receiving treatments at Tavistock.

Bell replies: “They’re less at risk now because the puberty blockers have been stopped. The puberty blockers have been stopped because there is no evidence base for them at all. … By putting them on that pathway, it rather becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

In December, a panel of three judges on the High Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling restricting Tavistock from issuing puberty blockers to children under 16. The High Court is one of the U.K.’s three senior courts under its Supreme Court.

The judges made their decision in part because of the testimony of Keira Bell, who is known in the U.K. for speaking out against the use of puberty blockers, which Tavistock prescribed to her when she wanted to become a male.

Channel 4’s Newman asks Bell about the High Court ruling in that case regarding kids under 16.

The psychiatrist calls the decision “really important because it acts to protect them.”

Bell later says that the “positioning of these girls as only having a gender problem acts to prevent them from developing in a normal way and their own nonconforming gender identity or sexuality” and adds: “This is a form of conversion therapy among people that are gay or lesbian.”

Newman asks Bell whether he “might be on the wrong side of history” in failing to be as vocally supportive of the transgender movement as one might expect from someone who worked at a gender clinic for decades.

He appears to have no qualms about tying the gender debate to politics, saying later that “one of the things gone terribly wrong in the Tavistock and elsewhere is the invasion of the clinical domain by the political ideology.”

Bell articulates the very phenomenon that has grown in the United States as well:

This is a very highly politicized area. And leaders from movements with a very powerful ideological commitment have managed to capture policy both medically, professionally, in the media, and in government with no evidence basis, a purely highly politicized movement; we just have these consequences.

All I’m saying … is [the children] need to wait. There needs to be a thoughtful engagement with them as opposed to motoring them through to treatment pathways that have irreversible consequences for their bodies. We’re talking about not doing harm to children.

 

Bell is at his most compelling when he discusses a real-life example of someone who is struggling with her sexuality.

“Let me put it very simply. A girl of 12 may find that she is sexually attracted to other girls,” Bell says, adding:

It may go through her mind: … Maybe I’m not a girl. Maybe I’m a boy. If that happened 10-15 years ago, that would have been a passing phase and things would have moved on. But now because of hugely changed cultural context and the penetration of social media, such a girl may go online and she may easily come to the belief … that she is a boy. And that having reached that [conclusion] … there will be lots of forces around her that will support it, and all her other difficulties will be repositioned through that prism.

 

Although Bell says he doesn’t believe that Tavistock tried to push him toward retirement or “hound him out,” he says the facility made it clear “that people like me that spoke out will come under the scrutiny in this very negative way.”

“I think it’s like a message to everyone else who don’t have my seniority, my safety: Oh, my God, I better not speak out, they’ll think I’m transphobic.”

Bell’s comments during this interview confirm that the High Court made the right decision when it ruled that Tavistock must stop giving puberty blockers to children under 16.

The psychiatrist’s articulations about gender ideology as a political movement, whether in the U.K. or the United States, are spot on. He was courageous to speak out on an issue that has become so controversial in such a short time.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Article appeared at https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/02/09/transition-treatment-harms-kids-veteran-psychiatrist-at-uk-gender-identity-clinic-says/

Walt Heyer, February 5, 2021, The Federalist.com

Photo HBO Max / YouTube

A new HBO Max documentary, “Transhood,” follows for five years the lives of four Kansas City, Mo. children who believe they are the opposite sex.

I identified as a “transgender woman” for eight years. Today, watching this documentary, I marvel at how the events of my childhood groomed me into believing that identifying as the opposite sex was the solution to my gender confusion. My heart goes out to these children who also are being groomed into a transgender life.

A Purple Dress Took My Boyhood Away

I can trace the onset of my gender confusion and wanting to be a female to the psychological, emotional, and sexual damage that occurred before I was ten. Starting when I was four years old, my dad would drop me off at my maternal grandparents’ house after work on Friday so he and my mom could take off for weekends of camping and fishing.

My grandparents lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles in a little shack behind an automobile junkyard. Grandpa was often out for hours at a time, towing cars. Grandma, a seamstress, stayed at home fashioning dresses for customers.

This is where my crossdressing and gender confusion started. I remember sitting on the porch, watching grandma cut and stitch pieces of purple chiffon cloth into a beautiful full-length evening dress for me, her four-year-old grandson. She helped me stand on a small stool for fittings and hemming. As she worked, she smiled and remarked how cute I looked.

The secret crossdressing “game” with grandma went on for about two years and ended abruptly when my mom and dad learned about it. Both were in shock. They threw the dress away and made sure that I never visited grandma’s alone again. But when my teen uncle found out about it, he teased me and made fun of me in front of my playmates, then escalated to sexual molestation.