Chloe Cole

And that presents itself in so many different ways, like the over-diagnosis of mental health conditions and over-prescription of amphetamines and such for conditions that a lot of kids arguably don't even have, which also had happened to me with the diagnosis of ADHD and being put on varying adult male doses of varying drugs over the years, which, I mean, I could talk all day about.

But when...

You're faced with these people as a parent who promise to do no harm to your child, to help in raising your child through either something mental, something psychiatric that they're struggling with, or maybe they have a condition supposedly with their bodies, and the only option that they're giving you

in this case with me and my parents, was transition or death.

So it was through my health care provider at the time, Kaiser Permanente.

They thought it over for a little bit, and part of the reason why I wrote them a letter was because I just wanted to give them some time to think it over before we all, like, talk together as a family.

And...

In the background, they started doing their research because they knew next to nothing about this, frankly.

I mean I think it was like Bruce had recently transitioned to Caitlin at the time and that was about the extent of their knowledge on it.

But they wanted to know more about this and why possibly a child would even be thinking about it.

And everything pointed them in the direction of –

Get psychiatric intervention or care for your child as soon as possible.

And they thought, okay, so what care is going to look like for her in a medical setting is they're going to look at all the underlying factors that might be leading to this.

They're going to rule anything out.

And they're going to help her deal with this and cope with these feelings in an age-appropriate way and help her build her identity without anything permanent happening.

But –

It was the very opposite.

It was like there was this huge rush to get me maybe what I wanted at the time naively, but not really focus on the actual problems and what I needed.

Right.

Yes.