Transgender Movement’s Last Defenders: Parents Who ‘Transitioned’ Their Children

This essay was first published at The European Conservative.

Across Europe, the so-called ‘affirmative model’ approach to gender dysphoria, with its brutal regimens of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex change surgeries, is being abandoned. Study after study reveal that medical authorities have, at the behest of the transgender movement, been perpetrating one of the ugliest medical scandals since eugenics. Young people—children, some of them—are being castrated, mutilated by the amputation of healthy breasts, and deformed by dangerous drugs prescribed to them by medical ideologues.

We are now seeing a generation of ‘de-transitioners’—those who embarked on the path of ‘affirmative care’ to ‘transition’ from one sex to another and realized that it had given them nothing and robbed of much—testifying at statehouses across America to call for bans on the surgeries that scarred their bodies. Those testimonies are being entirely ignored by the White House, the Democratic Party, and much of the progressive press and medical establishment, with a few brave dissident exceptions. They are ignoring stories like that of Chloe Cole.

Consider part of her testimony to Congress on her 19th birthday. Cole told the politicians that her parents were told by medical professionals that the only way to address her gender dysphoria was medical intervention:

I was fast-tracked onto puberty blockers and then testosterone. The resulting menopausal-like hot flashes made focusing on school impossible. I still get joint pain and weird pops in my back, but they were far worse when I was on the blockers.  

A month later, when I was 13, I had my first testosterone injection. It has caused permanent changes in my body. My voice will forever be deeper, my jawline sharper, my nose longer, my bone structure permanently masculinized, my Adam’s apple more prominent, and my fertility unknown. I look in the mirror sometimes, and I feel like a monster.  

I had a double mastectomy at 15 and they tested my amputated breasts for cancer. I was cancer free of course, I was perfectly healthy. There was nothing wrong with my still-developing body, or my breasts, other than that as an insecure teenage girl, I felt awkward about it.  

After my breasts were taken away from me, the tissue was incinerated. Before I was able to legally drive, I had a huge part of my future womanhood taken away from me. I will never be able to breastfeed. I struggle to look at myself in the mirror at times. I still struggle to this day with sexual dysfunction. I have massive scars across my chest and the skin grafts they used, that they took from my nipples, are weeping fluid today. They were grafted into a more masculine position, they said.  

Cole’s is one story of thousands, with thousands more to come—Cole told me that she believes her generation of ‘transgender kids,’ who bore the brunt of the ‘affirmative model,’ will turn the trickle of ‘de-transitioner’ testimonies into a torrent, and then a tidal wave. The broken children of the transgender medical complex were lied to, and they paid the price. But why is it that so many refuse to accept that this experiment has been such a tragedy, especially in North America? Why are so many doubling down?

One answer comes from Helen Joyce, a journalist, feminist advocate at the organization Sex Matters, and author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021). In a recent interview, she observed that there is one group of people in particular who will defend transgender ideology with total ferocity. I want to quote her in full:

Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from this. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced.

A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.

Like, I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has been turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child.” Or, oh, the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child. Or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person. And it may not even be widely known at that organization that they have a trans child. But it will come out, people will have sort of said quietly, and now you can’ talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can’t, because what you’re saying is: “You as a parent have done a truly, like, a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your own child that can not be fixed.” 

There are specific individuals who are actively against women’s rights here and it is not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels, that it is because they’ve transed their child. So those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me because people like me are standing in reproach to them. I don’t want to be, I’m not talking directly to them, and I don’t spend my time bitching to them. But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natal males in women’s spaces, well it is their son that we’re talking about. And they’ve told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his own basic sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don’t, there’s no way back for them and that child.

They’ve sold their child a bill of goods that they can’t deliver on. And I’m the one that has to be bullied to try to force me to deliver on it. So those people are going to be the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I’m sorry to say, because they’ve everything to lose, and it is a fight to the death as far as they are concerned.

Joyce’s insight here is absolutely correct. We’ve seen plenty of parents of ‘trans kids.’ In fact, often we see them first. They’re the ones putting their kids forward as trans—this is a bit of a fad in Hollywood at the moment, with actors from Charlize Theron to Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union announcing that they have transgender children. These revelations are unprompted. Many parents—famous and otherwise—are choosing to publicize their children as transgender, to boast about their support for ‘gender-affirming care,’ to do interviews about their child’s transness.

Having a ‘trans kid’ these days is like getting your child into an Ivy League school a couple of decades ago—it’s a status thing. Often parents—mothers in particular—rush to post about their child’s transness on social media, choosing to out them without their permission and often lock them into an identity before they’re old enough to comprehend what’s going on. Children ‘transitioned’ at a young age have the deck stacked against them if they want to ‘de-transition’—not to mention tremendous public, peer, and parental pressure.

There are plenty of other parents, like Chloe Cole’s, who have been blackmailed into accepting the ‘affirmative model’—but their grief is no less potent. Imagine realizing that you failed to protect your child from medical quacks who amputated healthy body parts and left them mutilated for life. Imagine realizing that your child’s suffering was exacerbated, rather than mitigated as promised. Imagine knowing that your child might never be able to have children of his or her own—or even experience sexual pleasure—because of treatments you assented to. That must be a special kind of nightmare for parents.

I can’t imagine what Cole’s parents go through as they watch their beautiful teenage daughter step up to podiums in front of state capitols and explain what happened to her, again and again. They, too, are in their own trans-created hell. I’ve noticed that while many ‘de-transitioners’ have come forward to tell their stories, we almost never hear from their parents. This makes sense. It is one thing for girls like Cole to tell the world what was done to them before they were old enough to vote, drink, drive, or smoke. It is quite another for a parent to tell the press: “I helped my daughter cut her breasts off and I’m here to tell you that what we participated in was abuse.” So yes, Helen Joyce is right. For many of these parents, defending transgender ideology and the decisions they made for their children is the only path forward—because contemplating the idea that they were wrong is simply too much to bear.

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