Chloe Cole is a young woman who “detransitioned.” That means that she used to identify as transgender, but no longer does. Now, she is suing the clinicians and corporations who facilitated her medicalized transition and, she argues, subjected her to irrevocable harm. One of the defendants is Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Inc.
Cole’s lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California in the county of San Joaquin, begins:
This case is about a team of doctors (i.e., the Defendants) who decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment on Chloe, then a thirteen-year-old vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health co-morbidities, who needed love, care, attention, and regular weekly psychotherapy, not cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgery.
Cole’s lawyers highlight her many mental-health concerns, which they say clinicians glossed over. And they also argue that the clinicians treating her failed to gain informed consent:
Defendants obscured and concealed important information such as the following: the conflicting studies in this area; the high quality evidence demonstrating poor mental health outcomes; the existence of only low to very low-quality studies purportedly supporting this treatment; the significant likelihood that desired outcomes would not be attained; the significant possibility of desistence, detransition and regret; and the lack of accurate models for predicting desistence and detransition.
They noted that “there is no other area of medicine where doctors will surgically remove a perfectly healthy body part and intentionally induce a disease state of pituitary gland function based simply on the patient’s wishes.”
This is a lawsuit worth keeping an eye on.