This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions convened on Wednesday for a hearing titled, “Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors.” In attendance as witnesses were Shannon Minter, the Legal Director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights; Dr. Kurt Miceli, Chief Medical Officer for conservative anti-trans advisory group Do No Harm; and, to nobody’s surprise, one of the preeminent spokeswomen for the anti-trans detransition movement, Chloe Cole.
Chairman Bill Cassidy, a Republican, opens the hearing by declaring that parents across the nation are terrified for the happiness and safety of their children, thanks to concerns about “transgender ideology taking over children’s schools, social media feeds, and monopolizing pediatric medical focus.” He goes on to say that “gender ideology” is “being pushed to convince children and parents that cross-sex hormones and irreversible sex change operations are acceptable solutions to gender dysphoria.”
He is wrong and stupid, or perhaps being willfully dishonest, as any reader of Assigned Media should know by now. Transition for children under 12 is almost always entirely social, though sometimes it may include puberty blockers if the child presents with precocious puberty. This is the same treatment administered to cisgender children since the early 1980s without any cause for concern. Surgeries relating to gender-affirming care are never performed on adolescents, and rarely on youth under the age of 18.
Cassidy justifies his fearmongering by bringing up a sharp increase in the diagnosis of gender dysphoria in the last few years, which is an argument so fragile as to be completely shattered by a single chart, which has become so ubiquitous in these kinds of “debates” as to now be an internet meme. He argues that this sudden uptick in diagnoses “seems to be more of a problem for children than adults,” saying that 25% of all transgender Americans are children, which is certainly a statistic he couldn’t provide a source for if he had a fucking gun to his head, but which also wouldn’t prove his point if it was true. If it’s “more of a problem for children,” why are three quarters of transgender Americans adults in his potentially fictitious statistic?
Is this man stupid? It seems to me like he should at least pretend to be impartial on the subject, being the chairman of the committee. I guess that’s just not necessary anymore.
Cassidy suggests that most children who identify as transgender go on to desist in that identity (they do not), and that gender-affirming care can cause lasting psychological and physiological harm (it does not). Since he fails to say anything novel or correct or even accurate when you squint during his opening statements, we should probably ignore everything else he has to say, and hope he falls into an open manhole soon.
An earnestly disheveled Senator Bernie Sanders speaks next, saying, “This hearing is disappointing. It is disappointing in the sense [that] millions of Americans are giving up on the political process. They look to Washington at a time when they are facing unprecedented crises … and today we are spending a hearing discussing [a topic] that impacts an infinitesimal number of people. If you’re concerned about children, why are we not dealing with the fact that the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth?”
Sanders carries on lambasting both the hearing and Republicans in general, before busting out a fact sheet of his own. He mostly rebuts the points I already countered, and stresses that the committee is wasting its time attacking widely supported standards of care for transgender people, who he characterizes as simply the latest punching bag for conservatives. He says, in no uncertain terms, that a trans child’s medical care should be between the child, their doctor and their parent, and that banning gender-affirming care for children nationwide would cause irreparable harm.
Thanks, Bernie!
Next up is Dr. Miceli who, as I stated previously, is a sort of stooge for an anti-trans activist organization. He repeats much of what Cassidy said, and tells some lies about the body of evidence (or lack thereof, if his lies are to be believed) in support of gender-affirming care for trans youth, as well as denying the suicidality of trans youth like the hideous ghoulish fuck he is. I invite him to join Cassidy in dropping down a long, dark hole forever.
After Miceli’s blessedly brief bout of quackery, our star takes the stage: Chloe Cole, one of only a few professional detrans activists the right-wing fraudsters have coerced into traveling around the nation decrying the act of medical transition by paying them vast sums of money. We’ve covered Chloe’s anti-trans activism many times before: we published a brief timeline of her bullshit back in 2022, when Assigned was still in its infancy; we covered the fact that Chloe has admitted to still experiencing gender dysphoria, and struggling with her natal sex; and we covered her lies about the effects of hormones on trans kids. Heck, we even covered her recommendation that trans people take psychedelic drugs instead of medically transitioning, which is incredibly funny if you know like… any trans women at all.
A couple years ago, Julie Rei Goldstein reported on Chloe Cole’s lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente for Assigned. More interesting than the lawsuit itself was the glut of documents released during the process of litigation, during which Chloe details a transition timeline that sounds truly horrific. She testifies to being rushed through the process of medical transition, spiraling into depression after taking testosterone, spiraling into depression after discontinuing testosterone, and undergoing a double mastectomy without anybody ever trying to stop her.
As far as I am aware, Chloe’s recounting of events has never been independently verified in any meaningful way. If I’m being honest, I largely do not believe her. Chloe’s own doctors have testified that her litigation and anti-trans activism are a coping mechanism that keeps her from spiraling mentally over regret about her transition. That, coupled with her ludicrous monetary gain for her activism, makes her a completely unreliable narrator as far as I am concerned.
Chloe recapitulates her unproven timeline of events, laments the loss of her “healthy breasts” (really tired of hearing that incredibly weird phrase), and describes a list of physical ailments that have never once been reported by anybody else in the entire world who has taken testosterone or had a double mastectomy. She says that “medicine heals what is sick; me being female was not a disease,” a thing that nobody has ever suggested to be the case. She says that, after she detransitioned, “the transgender cult” harassed and stalked her, which is an interesting thing to say about a group of people she is paid to professionally harass and abuse many times a year to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Fuck Chloe Cole. She is, as far as I am concerned, a lying bigot. She represents the most loathsome and detestable kind of detransitioner, who wants to do as much harm to the trans community as possible to make up for her own shortcomings. Most people who detransition do so because of a lack of support, not because they aren’t trans. Those who decide they actually aren’t trans regularly continue to support us. Those are the detransitioners who we should be listening to, because many of them do need our help. They need the love and support of a community that understands them, like ours does. They defend our right to transition, because they are some of our staunchest allies.
I hope Chloe Cole gets the help she desperately needs, and stops harming my community.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
