Biting the forbidden fruit: A detransitioner's story of regret and faith

By Chloe Cole, Op-ed contributor Thursday, August 27, 2026

I was hardly a stranger to loneliness and alienation in my childhood.

After-school hangouts, sleepovers, even just feeling like anyone was on my team were all things I thought I may only ever dream of, growing up. It proved much easier to get lost in the internet, video games, or my own creativity than to try being part of the world around me. After all, many of my closest “friends” would only be there out of pity, ridicule, to erase the artwork that I worked hard on, or pressure me into downing 3 shots of liquor for the first time when we were only 11 so they could laugh at me while I stumbled. In a world so cruel, why would I want to be there at all?

I felt different — broken, even. Eventually, I came to the belief that perhaps I had been born wrong altogether.

In the Garden of Eden, humanity’s first temptation was rooted in the belief that what God had given us was insufficient. The devil’s first tactic was to convince us that we could grasp something else and become something more if we just looked elsewhere.

The online trans community offered a respite from this brokenness. Piled on top of that affirmation, doctors too offered a treatment for it. I was just 12 years old, and before I could blink an eye, I found myself in the juxtaposition of being born a girl, yet feeling like happiness could only be found on the other side.

At the time, I had no reason to question the medical authorities telling my family that transition was the answer. They had plenty of evidence and studies to recite. After all, they were known as the best provider in California for treating gender-distressed youth. I certainly couldn’t have understood the larger system operating behind the exam-room doors. Years later, I dedicated my life to exposing just how deep that system goes.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine.’” Its findings are not surprising to detransitioners like me. I have long known that the gender medical industry is built upon false premises. But this report goes further, presenting evidence of fraudulent billing practices and financial incentives inside the medical institutions entrusted with vulnerable children.

As one of those former vulnerable children, I can attest to this egregious behavior. When my parents sought help for me, they were made to believe that withholding transition could mean losing me. The statistic that dominated the conversations in so many of those sterile exam rooms like mine? 41%. That’s the likelihood of suicide, parents were told — in story after story, time and time again — if they did not allow their child to undergo irreversible medical procedures like hormones and surgeries.

This stat is misleading at best, if not incredibly manipulative. The number came from a survey of trans-identifying and gender-nonconforming adults, 41% of whom reported having attempted suicide at some point in their lives. What it did not establish was that 41% of gender-distressed children would attempt suicide without hormones or surgery — much less that medical transition would prevent those deaths.

Yet parents with a distressed child heard a far more manipulative message: affirm and transition or begin preparations for a funeral.

Countless other families say they were presented with the horrifying choice of a “live son or a dead daughter.” Desperate to keep their child alive, they were coerced into medical interventions.

When you present a desperate mother and father with a choice between transition and death, I do not believe you are obtaining consent in any meaningful sense. You’re exploiting a parent’s greatest fear.

For the record, a healthy individual does not need affirmation of their identity, or the allowance of elective surgeries, in order to prevent self-harm and assure life. That in itself should have been a red flag to those involved.

The deeper I look at what happened to myself and my fellow victims of minor transitions, the more difficult it becomes to reconcile this movement’s claims with the basic principles of medicine.

Absurdly enough, my double mastectomy at age 15 happened at the height of the pandemic. While Americans weren’t able to say goodbye to their dying loved ones, weren’t able to get quality-of-life procedures done like knee and hip surgery, somehow, my elective, cosmetic procedure was greenlit. My healthy body became collateral damage in the gender ideology movement.

The HHS report alleges that pediatric gender programs exploded between the 2010s and the 2020s. It cites nearly $120 million in submitted charges since 2019, encompassing 5,747 minors who underwent surgeries and 8,579 who received hormones and puberty blockers.

More disturbing are the report’s findings concerning medical coding. HHS presents evidence suggesting that providers have used diagnoses such as “endocrine disorder, unspecified” to obtain coverage for puberty blockers even though gender dysphoria itself is not an endocrine disorder. Its claims analysis identified nearly $50 million billed for puberty blockers for minors carrying “endocrine disorder” or “precocious puberty” diagnoses to ensure providers get reimbursed through insurance.

This evident misuse of medical authority is exactly why exposing these practices matters. It seems that every time we shine light on the gender medical industrial complex, hundreds of cockroaches come scurrying out. We must continue exposing the darkness until every single roach disappears for good. 

I never imagined we would have a presidential administration willing to confront these institutions on behalf of children and families. Now, the Trump administration has directed investigations and enforcement efforts, and the Justice Department has issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics involved in performing these procedures on children.

For years, I searched for an explanation of why I felt so uncomfortable being myself. I wanted desperately for there to be some straightforward, scientific answer for my struggles while growing up and finding my life’s purpose.

I knew I was broken, but I was looking in the wrong places to put the pieces back together. I had unknowingly confused the consequences of living in a fallen, broken world with evidence that my creator had somehow made a mistake when He made me female.

For me, transitioning became my own act of biting into forbidden fruit. For a season, living a life that was not meant to be my own felt good. But it would never satisfy me — I would forever be trapped in a cycle of searching for the next change.

I kept running into brick walls because I was trying to create my own selfish answer instead of accepting His.

I still struggle fitting into a narrow box, and I think I always will. Christianity never promises to erase the difficulties of this world and the life that God has called you to. No matter what “identity” you have — male or female, white collar or blue collar, academically smart or street smart — life will come with its challenges. The answer to those challenges is to embrace the story that God has written for you, and to embrace your weaknesses. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of pleading with God to remove his “thorn,” only to receive the answer: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

The world told me my weakness meant my body needed changing. God has taught me that weakness could become the very place where His grace was most visible.

Behind every statistic in this report is a child asking questions much larger than medicine — and larger than themselves or any name, haircut, or clothing they could try on. They’re searching for meaning. For purpose. Why am I hurting? Why am I different? Who even am I? Will I ever belong somewhere?

Thousands of those children have been enticed by medical institutions looking for the answers to those questions. We cannot allow those institutions to tell another generation that the answer is to wage war against their own bodies. There is a better answer: You were not born a mistake. Your body is not an accident. And the God who created you loves you and wants to heal what you hate.