Chloe Cole

The women who get their uteruses removed and they go into early menopause, well, then they're at risk of things like prolapses or developing very early onset dementia.

The men who go on these treatments over a long period of time, they are at risk of male breast cancer, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and that's not just

That's not even going into the physical consequences of being completely sterile.

It's not just about whether you're able to have kids, but you're not able to have healthy sexual function, which is a very important part for adulthood for almost everybody.

And when you're doing this to children, the younger that you go, the worse the consequences are.

When you start these treatments before a certain age, a child will never be able to sexually develop or have kids of their own.

And children just do not – they do not have the developmental maturity or worldly experience to be able to really truly sit down with themselves and ask, do I really want this for myself?

I know I do.

I think as naive as I was and as young as I was at the time, I knew that I did not want to go through that process.

I knew that it was experimental and that it would never actually make me do the opposite sex.

So I thought, okay, I'm not – it's not worth the risk as much as I wish I didn't have what I have.

I am not going to do that to myself and thankfully I opted to get out of it before I went to any further change and compared to a lot of my friends, I've managed to come out relatively unscathed.

Yes, and I've lost a lot.

I've grieved a lot.

I wish that I didn't miss out on such a critical period of my life, but I'm grateful that I didn't lose more because I've seen just how bad it can get, and I still have so much of my life ahead of me, and I've realized over the years—

I'm not alone, and I could use my experience to help other children and help other families as well as bring more national awareness around this and what is actually happening in our hospital systems.

So right now, we don't really have proper statistics on this because, well, a lot of the studies that are conducted around it don't really have standardized definitions of things like detransition or even regret itself.

And they'll actively exclude people like me from participating in these surveys and in these studies.

So they can't even get the numbers that they would actually need.

And that is on purpose, of course.