'A Mental Breakdown from Testosterone': Detransitioners Tell Heartbreaking Stories to Trump Admin
The Trump administration's new leader of the Department of Education met with a group of detransitioners Wednesday to discuss ways to protect young people from the dangers and harms associated with transgender ideology.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon sat down with several detransitioners for "Detrans Awareness Day" to not only hear their personal stories of hardship but to gain more insight as to how the American education system is playing a dark role in pushing students toward irreversible gender transition procedures.
We were honored to welcome this group to @usedgov in recognition of Detrans Awareness Day.
— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) March 13, 2025
We stand firmly alongside parents, advocates, and detransitioners in their fight to protect children from the serious harms caused by radical gender ideology. pic.twitter.com/X4Un9tOS69
"I commend the young people in attendance for bravely sharing their experiences—and the medical and mental health professionals and parents for their tireless advocacy," said McMahon.
Claire Abernathy, 20, shared how she was socially transitioned without her parent's knowledge.
"Social transition — changing names, pronouns, school records — it seems harmless, but it often initiates a trajectory that is challenging to stop once begun," Abernathy explained.
That social transition led her to start taking testosterone to transition to a boy after her 14th birthday, the Federalist reports. Six months later, she underwent a double mastectomy.
"My school affirmed this identity without informing my parents, they started calling me a new name and pronouns, and letting me use the boys' bathroom and locker rooms, and this immediate affirmation led me swiftly into medicalization," she explained.
"Other children and teens are being led down this same path, being told that transition is the only answer for them," Abernathy warned. "They're too young to understand the consequences. They're not mature enough."
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Detransitioner Elle Palmer, 25, told the Department of Education officials that she was the first one at her school to identify as transgender.
"Once I started going, the school was pretty much instantly affirming, and I was their first trans student so they really wanted to 'do it right,'" Palmer said. "So I was basically educating them on how I wanted to be treated, and they kind of let me have the reins."
She said she dropped out of school by the age of 13, began identifying as "non-binary" at the age of 14, and started taking testosterone at the age of 15 as part of a deal with her parents if she enrolled back in school.
"Shortly after I started attending and started making friends, two of my female friends came out as trans after they met me," she said. "By next year that I graduated, I had doubled or tripled the amount of trans friends that I had."
Palmer said social media and internet content played a major role in the decision to identify as male.
"I was incredibly isolated and living most of my life online. You can kind of start to imagine yourself as a boy, because you're using 'he/him' pronouns online — nobody knows any different," Palmer explained. "You're introducing yourself as 'Luke,' telling everyone that you're a boy, nobody's questioning you, they don't see pictures of you, they don't hear your voice. So I started to live out this identity, thinking I was really a boy."
Laura Becker, 28, said she was more vulnerable to the lies of gender ideology because she was diagnosed with autism.
"All I really needed was a safe adult in the room to protect me. I was autistic. I was even more vulnerable than the average kid, and no one was helping: No teachers, no professors, no school staff, no school counselor," Becker said. "My issues were very overt: I was cutting myself, I wasn't showering, I was an overtly very depressed, socially awkward child in this environment, and no one was advocating for me."
Becker added that her identity was later affirmed by her high school's Gay-Straight Alliance and teaching staff.
It led her to choose to get a double mastectomy – a decision she now regrets.
"I ended up having a mental breakdown from testosterone, and at the age of 20, I had my breasts cut off," Becker said. "I was actually suicidal the day of the surgery, but the surgeon went ahead anyway. Obviously, I was not of sound mind to consent."
"No teacher should attempt to persuade or coerce a student to undergo a gender transition. No parent should be lied to or prevented from knowing what is going on with their child's mental or physical health. We stand firmly alongside parents, professionals, advocates, and especially detransitioners, who understand firsthand the damage caused by indoctrinating kids to believe that they can ever be 'born in the wrong body,'" said McMahon.
Meanwhile, detransitioner Chloe Cole stood beside Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) on Capitol Hill Wednesday as he introduced a bill that would block federal funding for hospitals that perform sex-change surgeries on minors.
Huge thanks to all who joined me today. The Left’s radical gender ideology is on its last legs, and it’s time to deliver the final blow with my bill: https://t.co/pAKHPHRDB6 pic.twitter.com/a0IB1Ek3s8
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) March 12, 2025
Cole is one of the most vocal ex-transgender people speaking out about how she regrets undergoing a double mastectomy.
In 2022, she filed a lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente, alleging that doctors and staff convinced her and her parents that she should undergo treatments by saying that medical transition was the only way to resolve her gender dysphoria and address her high risk of suicide.
It's a decision she deeply regrets.
"I realized my mistake when I was 16 years old," she wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post. "I'd tried to change genders before I was even a teenager."
"I still believed the doctors when they told me to get a double mastectomy. I let them cut off my breasts. To this day, I have wounds where they used to be," she wrote.
"By the time I realized I'd made a mistake and couldn't go back, by the time I realized that the doctors and nurses and psychiatrists were radicals who didn't really care about me, the damage was done," Cole continued.
Crenshaw says, "It's time to recognize the harm being done and what we must do to stop it."
His bill would serve as a line of defense for young people like Chloe.
According to Do No Harm, a medical nonprofit, hospitals raked in more than $119 million between 2019 and 2023 from gender transition procedures, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery.
"Children's hospitals are ruining children's lives in the name of radical transgender ideology," wrote Cole. "They need to be stopped. Those kids need to be protected from this insanity."
Detrans Awareness Day was established in 2021 to honor the experiences of detransitioners and make the public aware of the harmful effects of gender ideology and "gender medicine."
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