If her story is to be believed (after all the time she’s spent in the spotlight it still has yet to be fact-checked by a mainstream news outlet), Chloe Cole started puberty blockers at the age of 13, followed by testosterone therapy and a chest masculinization surgery as a teenager, followed by a subsequent detransition in her later teens. If treating gender dysphoria in youth requires sterilization, Cole ought to be sterile. However, neither essays written under her name nor the lawsuit she’s brought against the doctors who once treated her make that claim. If Cole wasn’t sterilized why, then, is she claiming that gender-affirming treatments for minors are sterilizing in a recent op-ed for the Orange County Register?
The charge that gender-affirming care sterilizes minors is a lie, and it’s one that is being repeated widely with little pushback. In reality, puberty blockers are not sterilizing, full stop. Cross-sex hormones are not sterilizing, full stop. There has been speculation that the combination of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones might lead to a permanent reduction in fertility for some patients, particularly transfemmes, for whom there is less information available. Young people and their families are extensively counseled about the risks to fertility and fertility preservation alternatives when they consider medical steps like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
There are, of course, surgical interventions some trans people need that are sterilizing. (It almost shouldn’t need to be said, but chest surgery is not one of them.)
Among those pushing the lie that gender-affirming care is sterilizing is Twitter owner Elon Musk, who tweeted it just last week. Musk tweeted his opposition to California’s AB 957 which would direct family court judges to take into account parents’ support of their children’s gender identity as a factor in custody disputes.
This, again, is a lie. Musk is claiming that the only possible way for a parent to support a trans child involves sterilization, when in truth this would rarely if ever be the case. Supporting a trans child more typically includes allowing them to dress as they wish and calling them by a name and using pronouns that they prefer. Much more rarely it might include exploring medical options for a child experiencing severe distress, and only rarely would those options include a significant risk to fertility, much less actual sterilization.
As usual, opponents of gender-affirming care can’t stick to the facts, because the fact is that most gender-affirmation is purely cosmetic (a matter of haircuts, not surgery), and even the medical treatments aren’t sterilizing most of the time. Elon Musk may not know this (the guy, frankly, sounds like a total kook). Chloe Cole does. Cole wasn’t sterilized, despite claiming to have commenced gender-affirming care at 13. Gender-affirming care is not typically sterilizing, and risks to fertility should be weighed against the medical benefits of treatment for the individual patient, as they would with any other sort of medical care.
> Musk is claiming that the only possible way for a parent to support a trans child involves sterilization, when in truth this would rarely if ever be the case. Supporting a trans child more typically includes allowing them to dress as they wish and calling them by a name and using pronouns that they prefer. Much more rarely it might include exploring medical options for a child experiencing severe distress, and only rarely would those options include a significant risk to fertility, much less actual sterilization.
Even if it did lead to sterilization, there are options for that, like freezing sperm and eggs, which a supportive parent could happily direct their kids to if they actually cared about that. But Musk doesn’t. He just hates trans people.
I think the hyperventilation about "sterilization" is one of the more annoying instances of hypocrisy in the anti-trans rhetoric since it is very often these very same people who crow about the "ridiculousness" of "pregnant men" etc. or use the fact that some detransitioned ppl do go on to have children as a reason why trans adolescents ought to be denied care.
So, anti-trans activists can argue ppl receiving GAC do not, in many situations permanently lose their fertility and THAT is a problem OR they can argue that ALL GAC risks all future fertility and THAT is a problem, but they can’t argue both.
One "expert" giving testimony during legislative debate earlier this year claimed that GAC was sterilizing and then, IN THE SAME TESTIMONY, told a story of a person who lamented top surgery bc when she got pregnant mere months after detransitoning she was unable to breastfeed. So…which is it?
The answer, of course, is nuanced and dependent upon a variety of factors, some of which will be unknowable at the time treatment decisions are being made or, knowable and mitigating steps can be taken, or knowable but not deemed as critical as other competing factors…but this not very compelling rhetoric.