(California Globe) A few weeks ago I sat down with Chloe Cole. She was 15 the first time a doctor put her on puberty blockers. By 16, she’d undergone a double mastectomy. She told me, plainly, that no one in the room, not her parents, not her doctors, not the school counselors who nudged her toward “transition,” ever slowed down long enough to ask if a confused, socially anxious teenage girl might need something other than a scalpel.
She’s since detransitioned. She’s also become one of the most effective advocates in the country for a simple idea: children cannot consent to procedures that permanently alter their bodies, and the adults who are supposed to protect them shouldn’t get a pass when they don’t.
And this isn’t a story from somewhere else. Chloe is from Manteca, California’s Central Valley, Northern California, same as us, and it was Kaiser Permanente that treated her. She’s currently suing Kaiser and the doctors involved in San Joaquin County Superior Court, and last September, the California Court of Appeal rejected Kaiser’s attempt to push her case into private arbitration, meaning it’s headed to a public trial, now scheduled for April 2027.