WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Tensions ran high during a U.S. Senate committee hearing on Wednesday as Republicans argued that children need to be protected from the irreversible harm of gender mutilating medical treatments and surgical procedures while Democrats and LGBT activists insisted that decisions regarding so-called gender-affirming care should be left to the parents of minors and their doctors.
The clash occurred during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) hearing titled “Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors.”
Detransitioner Chloe Cole, who was given puberty blockers and testosterone injections at 13 and had her breasts removed at 15, told the committee, “I hadn’t even had my first kiss or practiced driving before. How could they take away part of my womanhood before I was old enough to call myself one?”
She said that her parents were manipulated by the medical staff when they were offered a dire Hobson’s choice: “Transition your daughter or bury her.”
“That’s the lie my parents were told. What they weren’t told was that trying to change my sex would destroy my mental health, or more importantly, that we had another much healthier option: Saying ‘No’ to all of this,” Cole said.
“Instead of honoring my parents’ instincts to keep me safe, the doctors put me on a chemical castration drug to stop my puberty, followed by massive doses of testosterone to induce a fake male puberty,” she explained. “I’m almost 22 years old now. I have no breasts because they were replaced with scars.”
“This is not medicine. Medicine heals what is sick. But me being female was not a disease. The lie was a disease,” she declared.
She continued:
An entire generation of children were lied to. There is no such thing as a child being born in the wrong body, but there are physicians and medical bodies who prey on the confusion of perfectly healthy young boys and girls.
Congress needs to ban these procedures on minors, protect parents who refuse them, investigate the medical institutions that promoted them, and make sure that children who have already been harmed are cared for.
…
Any member of Congress who defends this should have to look parents in the eye and explain why their child’s body is now a commodity that they can sell to the gender industry.
The American people have woken up from the obvious lie of transgenderism.
There is no excuse for the mutilation of young people. Members of Congress who still defend it should have to look parents in the eye and explain why their child’s healthy body is now a commodity. pic.twitter.com/dPgxnmGACe
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChloeCole) June 3, 2026
Shannon Minter, a woman who has undergone extensive “sex-change” treatments in order to become a bald-headed, bearded man, argued against government interventions to ban so-called gender-affirming treatments.
“The government is baselessly attacking safe and effective medical care,” said Minter, legal director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights.
“It is not the young person who consents to this care,” Minter claimed. “It is the parents who have the legal responsibility and authority to consent to the care.”
When Republican Senator Jim Banks asked Minter if it is ever “appropriate for a gay pride flag to be in a kindergarten classroom,” Minter attempted to skirt the question.
Banks pressed Minter further.
“You don’t want to answer that question? You think it’s appropriate for teachers to expose children as young as kindergarten-age to issues of sexuality, or political statements about sexuality?” Banks asked. “Would you defend that as a lawyer? Would you defend a teacher that places a gay pride flag in a kindergarten classroom?
“What I do defend is the constitutional right of parents to make medical decisions for their own children,” said Minter, reverting to keeping the door open for performing gender-mutilating procedures for minors.
Gay pride flags should not be placed in children’s classrooms.
Teachers should not be exposing young children to political statements about sexuality.
This is common sense.
This is not controversial.
We must put our children first. pic.twitter.com/rftuHNOzDq— Senator Jim Banks (@SenatorBanks) June 3, 2026
Dr. Kurt Miceli, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at the watchdog group Do No Harm, admitted to the Senators that “my profession, medicine, sometimes gets things wrong.”
“This is not medicine,” Miceli stated. “The public knows this as well. Support for gender transition procedures for minors is rapidly declining among all voters.”
“If we want to restore the American public’s trust in the medical profession, we must start by admitting we have made a grave mistake, and the time to fix it is now,” Miceli said.
Families were assured sex change-interventions were evidence-based and medically necessary.@DoNoHarm‘s Dr. Kurt Miceli explains why more physicians, researchers, and parents are demanding answers. pic.twitter.com/OjKbCB7ZdB
— American Parents Coalition (@USAParent) June 3, 2026