Protecting Kids Means Protecting Them From This Too

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. She isn’t the only one. Another young Northern California woman, Kayla Lovdahl, filed a nearly identical lawsuit in the same San Joaquin County court after undergoing a double mastectomy at age 13, also through Kaiser. Two teenagers, one hospital system, two families who say they were told their daughters would be at risk of suicide without these interventions. This isn’t a hypothetical from a cable news debate. It happened a short drive from here.

That idea now has a name in Congress: the Chloe Cole Act of 2026 (H.R. 7651), introduced by Rep. Bob Onder (R-Mo.). It passed the House Judiciary Committee on July 20 and is now waiting, with no floor vote yet scheduled, for House leadership to bring it to the floor. It deserves one.

Here’s what it does. It defines sex as biological fact rather than a matter of self-declaration. It bars physicians, clinics, and hospitals from providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or so-called “sex-reassignment” surgeries to minors. And most importantly, it gives kids and their parents a private right of action, the ability to sue, when a medical provider damages a healthy body with one of these interventions, with a statute of limitations long enough to account for the fact that regret and clarity often arrive years later, not at 16.

The scale of what we’re talking about is not small. Between 2019 and 2023, by one accounting, nearly 5,750 American children underwent surgical procedures related to gender transition, another 14,000 minors received cross-sex hormone treatment, and over 62,000 sex-change prescriptions were written for kids. These aren’t outlier cases. This became standard practice at major children’s hospitals in this country, marketed as “gender-affirming care” and defended as settled science, when the honest answer is that the long-term outcomes of these interventions are still poorly understood.

The Chloe Cole Act follows through on an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year ending federal support for pediatric medical transition. It’s backed by the Department of Justice, which formally transmitted the legislative language to Congress. Sen. Marsha Blackburn has introduced the companion bill in the Senate. “No child should be pushed into irreversible chemical and surgical mutilation under the guise of so-called ‘gender-affirming care,'” she’s said. Rep. Onder, who is also a physician, has put it this way: “Children deserve medical care grounded in scientific evidence, not experimental interventions driven by biased agendas.”

I expect the usual response to a column like this: that raising it at all is cruel, that it’s “erasure,” that it targets an already vulnerable group. I’d ask anyone who believes that to sit down with Chloe Cole, or with any of the growing number of young detransitioners now speaking out, and explain to them why the people who accelerated them toward permanent surgery as teenagers shouldn’t face any accountability at all. Protecting a vulnerable kid from a bad outcome isn’t hatred of that kid. It’s the opposite of hatred. It’s the bare minimum we owe children who can’t yet drive, vote, or sign a lease, and who most states rightly agree can’t get a tattoo, but who, until very recently, could get a mastectomy on the strength of a few counseling sessions.

This bill doesn’t ban anyone from being who they are; it bans doctors from performing irreversible procedures on children’s bodies and then walking away immune from consequences when it goes wrong. That’s not extremism. That’s basic accountability, the same kind we’d demand in any other area of medicine.

H.R. 7651 is out of committee. It’s sitting there waiting for a floor vote. If you agree that kids deserve better than being a test case for an unproven medical fad, call your representative and tell them to bring it to a vote.