CHLOE COLE: My name is Chloe Cole and I am a de-transitioner. Another way to put that would be: I used to believe that I was born in the wrong body and the adults in my life, whom I trusted, affirmed my belief and this caused me lifelong, irreversible harm.

I speak to you today as a victim of one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of the United States of America. I speak to you in the hope that you will have the courage to bring the scandal to an end, and ensure that other vulnerable teenagers, children, and young adults don’t go through what I went through.

At the age of 12, I began to experience what my medical team would later diagnose as gender dysphoria. I was well into an early puberty, and I was very uncomfortable with the changes that were happening to my body. I was intimidated by male attention. And when I told my parents that I felt like a boy, in retrospect, all I meant was that I hated puberty, that I wanted this newfound sexual tension to go away. I looked up to my brothers a little bit more than I did to my sisters.