LGBT

House Advances ‘Chloe Cole Act’ Banning ‘Transgender’ Procedures For Minors

Advocates for children’s well-being celebrated the House Judiciary Committee’s vote in favor of the Chloe Cole Act. The bill, HR 7651, bans irreversible, body-mutilating ‘transgender’ procedures for minors. 

The legislation also allows children damaged by these interventions to bring a civil suit against health professionals, hospitals or clinics up to 25 years after their 18th birthday. Parents or guardians may also file lawsuits. 

The Act, sponsored by Missouri Rep. Bob Onder, has 86 sponsors and passed out of the committee on a strict party-line vote of 15-8 on June 15. 

Cole, whose body was irreparably injured by transgender medical procedures, applauded the victory on X, saying “Thank you @JudiciaryGOP for standing up for future generations!”

HR 7651 defines specific harmful transgender medical interventions that would be banned for minors and would allow for civil suits, including: 

  • Intentionally delaying, halting, or disrupting the natural development of the individual’s body, including the onset or progression of puberty, so that it does not develop or halts developing to correspond to the individual’s sex.
  • Changing the individual’s body, including the individual’s external appearance or biological functions, to no longer correspond to the individual’s sex.
  • Providing puberty blockers or opposite sex hormones.
  • Surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance or that attempt to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs.

On June 3, Cole testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in a hearing titled, “Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors.” 

She told the committee: 

As a child, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and underwent medical transition as a minor, including puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and an irreversible double mastectomy.

Cole was only 15 when she underwent surgery to remove her breasts, explaining that these interventions did nothing to help her sexual identity confusion:

The peace and self-acceptance I was promised did not come. I am now almost 22 years old, and I live every day with the consequences of decisions made when I was a minor.

Cole listed the bodily harms she has suffered from the transgender medical industry: 

I have scars where healthy breasts used to be. I did not complete normal female puberty. I experience pain in my knees and hips that I associate with the treatment I received. I still live with trauma from what was done to my body. There are periods when I feel numb, have flashbacks, or experience nightmares.

She went on to explain that children “lack the maturity” to make decisions “that permanently alter their bodies and may affect their fertility, sexual function, and lifelong health.” She described her regret and the harassment she has received for speaking against harmful procedures. 

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, testified in favor of the bill, saying: 

The harm any such ban would cause to transgender young people and their families is profound and unjustified.

Minter, a female attempting to live as a man, ignored the paucity of evidence in favor transgender interventions. And she completely overlooked recent studies and reviews, from Sweden, Finland, the U.K. and the U.S., showing the deep harms of medicalizing a mental health issue.

Dr. Kurt Miceli, MD, chief medical officer of Do No Harm, detailed the weak evidence for inflicting these medical procedures on children and stated they are “ideologically driven rather than grounded in emerging evidence.”

A companion bill, S 2907, has been sponsored in the Senate by Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn. 

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Related articles and resources: 

Addressing Gender Identity with Honesty and Compassion

American College of Pediatricians: No Benefits From ‘Gender-Affirming’ Interventions

FTC Begins Investigating ‘Gender-Affirming’ Medical Community for Deception, False Advertising

HHS Finalizes Report Finding Sex-Rejecting Procedures Harm Minors

HHS Releases Report on Harms of ‘Transgender’ Medical Interventions for Minors

Florida Sues Medical Groups for Promoting ‘Transgender’ Mutilation of Children

New Research Shows ‘Transgender’ Identity Dramatically Driven by Immaturity

Medicalizing Gender Confusion Makes Things Worse, New Research Confirms

Resources for families struggling with wrong-sex identification

Transgenderism and Minors: What Does the Research Really Show?

UK Bans Puberty Blockers for ‘Transgender’ Minors

U.K.’s Review of Child Gender Policy Reveals Profound Failures That U.S. Still Defends

Senators Introduce ‘Stop the Sexualization of Children Act’

Congress is considering legislation to prohibit schools from using federal money for sexually explicit and transgender materials in classrooms.

Senators Jim Banks, James Lankford and Tommy Tuberville introduced the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act in the Senate. Representative Mary Miller sponsored the bill in the House, where it has already passed the Committee on Education and Workforce by a party-line vote of 18-13.

In a press release, Tuberville said of the proposed legislation, HR 7661:

Exposing children to sexually explicit material in classrooms is completely inappropriate and a gross abuse of taxpayer dollars. I will continue to work with my colleagues to remove this kind of content from our classrooms to protect the innocence of our young people.

Tuberville’s statement explained the need for the bill:

Research has shown that exposure to sexual content at a young age can increase the risk of early sexual activity, unsafe sexual practices, and other risky sexual behaviors. In recent years, concerns have grown among parents regarding sexually explicit materials, activities, and themes being introduced in schools.

HR 7661 is supported by Christian and conservative groups like Family Research Council, Family Policy Alliance, Moms for America and American Principles Project.

The American Library Association (ALA) opposed the legislation to protect children. President Sam Hemick issued a statement expressing disappointment the bill had passed the House committee, saying:

H.R. 7661 is a dangerous bill that steals the power to choose what kids read away from parents, local communities and well-trained educators and librarians, and gives it to politicians in Washington, D.C. Congress is not authorized to make decisions about what kids read in school, and it is not allowed to interfere with the rights of states and communities to control their own schools.

As previously reported by the Daily Citizen, the ALA believes it is “banning books” to keep graphic and disturbing content out of public schools. The organization’s “Library Bill of Rights” states that children should have access to whatever books they want and they deserve “privacy and confidentiality” – including from parents – in those decisions.

Stop Sexualization of Children amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to read:

No funds under this Act may be used to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, including any program, activity, literature, or material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing.

It labels “sexually oriented material” as material that:

(i) includes any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct (as defined in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of section 2256(2) of title 18, United States Code).
(ii) involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.

The federal statute cited, 18 U.S. Code § 2256, defines “sexually explicit conduct” for child exploitation laws. Schools could no longer use federal funds to pay for materials that depict explicit sexual activity and lewd behaviors.

HR 7661 makes allowances for “classic works of art” in the classroom which may contain nudity, citing art listed in the Smarthistory’s guide to Advanced Placement Art History as acceptable.

The legislation makes clear that “classic works of literature,” which may contain mild sexual content, are not included in the restricted books but are available to older students. It lists works found in “Great Books of the Western World,” published by Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read,” by Thomas Purifoy Jr.; and “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read,” by Mary Pierson Purifoy.

There are literally hundreds of good options for teachers; there is no need to expose minors to books that detail graphic sexual activity.

Banks said in a press release, “The American taxpayer should not be funding sexually explicit content for minors, it’s that simple.”

Miller expressed the need to protect children from false and confusing “transgender ideology, saying, “Our taxpayer-funded schools exist to educate children, not expose them to sexually explicit material or promote the false idea that a child can be born in the wrong body.”

Related articles and resources:

American Library Association Chooses Marxist Lesbian as President-Elect

‘Banned Books Week’ – What a Fraud

Equipping Parents for Back-to-School

National Education and Library Groups Co-Sponsor Transgender Reading Day for Elementary School Children

Plugged In Book Reviews

Resources When Your Child Encounters LGBT Ideology at School

Sexualizing Schoolchildren: Classroom and Library Books

Three Ways the Media Supports Sexually Explicit, Inappropriate Books for Children

What Gender-Confusing Books Did You Read in School Today, Johnny?

Photo from Getty Images.

How ‘Pride’ 2026 Showed That the LGBT Movement Is Imploding

If there is a takeaway from this year’s month-long celebration of sexual experimentation, redefinition and rebellion, it is that LGBTQ has been fully revealed as the incoherent mess it always has been.

The ever-growing rainbow of letters do not represent a unified worldview because each denies the wonder and truth of what it means to be human. In fact, they are set on upending this. Whether you have a Christian (or some other faith-basis) or an evolutionary materialist worldview, you believe that both male and female and their union are essential for sexuality, the family and humanity to function.

Opposition to this fact is the primary flaw of all LGBTQ ideology and it has been demonstrated in colorful ways around this year’s “pride” month. The rainbow coalition is finally imploding.

Two key leaders in this movement have demonstrated this very powerfully. One is old, the other young.

The old one is Andrew Sullivan who essentially kick-started the same-sex marriage redefinition debate with his ground-breaking 1989 “Here Comes the Groom” article in the New Republic magazine. Being a grandfather of this movement, Sullivan has become the movement’s cranky old man, bemoaning that gay rights movement became too radical by going “trans” and queer. In fact, The New York Times gave Sullivan 4,200 words of its precious print real estate last year for him to amply illustrate how LGBTQ “radicalized and lost its way.”

But in early June 2026, Sullivan confessed how “distressing” it is to find the Ts and the Qs are “setting us back 20 years” because of their radicalness. This was demonstrated in a June Gallup report indicating support for gay and lesbian relationships among republicans, democrats and independents had turned southward.

Gallup also explained that support for gay “marriage” started dipping in 2023 and has continued to decline. Sullivan blames this decline on the fact that trans and queer ideologies have become “hegemonic” in LGTQ world. So much so, as Sullivan explained, it’s “why it is only appropriate that [NYC mayor Zohran] Mamdani put out a ‘pride’ statement this week referring solely to ‘queer and trans people,’ excising LGBs from the movement we built.”

Kicked off their own bus because they are seen by supporters as boringly traditional.

The younger voice criticizing the devolution of LGTBQ is 36-year-old Matthew Vines who gained notoriety in 2015 for his deeply heretical book, God and the Gay Christian. It sought to rewrite Jesus’ clear sexual ethic, explained in Mark 10 and Matthew 19, which affirmed the truth of Genesis’ creation anthropology.

On the last day of this year’s ‘pride’ month, The New York Times published an editorial from Vines concerned that the movement he helped prop up is losing serious steam because “queer” is overtaking the “gay” that he salutes. In fact, his piece is titled, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.”

It matters to Vines because, like Sullivan, “queer” is too radical for his liking. But as so many of Vines’ peers in his own movement reminded him so many times in negative reaction to his piece, the gay movement has always been about challenging convention.

The Advocate opined that people like Sullivan and Vines “suggest we can have our rights so long as we reassure the broader public that we are not too political, too gender-nonconforming, too disruptive, too trans, too angry, too difficult, too visible, too queer.”  The Washington Blade, in reaction to Vines, explained the central problem in their view is “the United States remains a nation that enforces and exalts a heterosexual, cisgender majority.” Thus, to “be queer, to resist and reject standards that normalizes and essentialize gender and sexuality, is a countercultural act, whether or not people like Vines are ready to acknowledge it.”

Sullivan and Vines mistakenly assumed that redefining marriage to allow same-sex couples to “marry” would settle gays down. They were wrong. This movement only knows how to grow more radical because that is its very DNA.

Vines is also sad that his movement no longer believes its old baseless talking point “that being gay is not a choice” in favor of same-sex relationships being “better thought of as a part of a wider rebellion against social norms.”

Of course, Vines is correct in this observation. Major LGBT voices have been challenging the idea that sexual orientation is fixed as the “born-this-way” claim asserts. The truth is, there is actually very little agreement over what sexual orientation even is and is not.

The most significant among these voices is lesbian gender scholar Lisa Diamond who destroyed the ‘born-this-way’ claim in a popular TED Talk. She explained the claim is not supported by scientific data, nor is it “fair” to gay and lesbian political efforts. 

Professor Sari van Anders of Queen’s University in Canada has called for retiring the concept of sexual orientation altogether in favor of her more scientifically and experientially accurate “Sexual Configuration Theory.” She holds that “sexual orientation as a term is increasingly seen as regressive,” because it “belongs to the bioessentialist project.” That “project” holds that male and female are actual biological categories. After all, gay or lesbian mean nothing if male and female do not actually exist.

University of California, Riverside sociologist Brandon Andrew Robinson has recently renewed the call to abolish all sexual identities like gay and lesbian because open fluidity allows for so many more possibilities. UC Riverside reports Robinson’s thesis is, “Sexual identity functions as a kind of prison, confining human desire and reinforcing a false notion of gender based on fixed, biological categories.” The tide is moving against you, Mr. Vines.

This is why the LGBT movement is presently imploding. It is set on overturning the historic and culturally universal reality of what it means to be human as male and female. It is set on overturning a creation anthropology given to us in the truth and wisdom of Genesis, which, as we have seen, is solidly affirmed by Jesus himself.

No wonder it’s imploding. This false ideology is riddled with internal contradictions. 

Our job is to continue to demonstrate the various ways that ‘pride’ month and its rainbow banner are set against human truth, and thus collapsing as a result.

Appeals Court Reverses Decision Against Christian Counselors

A federal appeals court threw out a decision against two licensed counselors following the U.S. Supreme Court’s March ruling in Chiles v. Salazar, which protects counselors’ free speech rights.

At the center of the current case are Wyatt Bury and Pamela Eisenreich, licensed Christian counselors who help clients facing many different challenges – from loneliness to hopelessness to other mental health struggles. The counselors also help minor clients seeking freedom from unwanted same-sex attraction or confusion over their sexual identity.

However, Kansas City, Missouri, and Jackson County, Missouri, passed ordinances prohibiting counselors from engaging in talk therapy – often wrongly derided by LGBT activists as “conversion therapy” – with minors seeking hope and healing in these areas.

Counselors are prohibited from helping minor clients leave unwanted homosexuality or “transgenderism”; they are only permitted to help minor clients embrace homosexuality or a new “gender identity” – even if the clients have opposite goals.

Because of the ordinances, Bury and Eisenreich – and other Christian counselors – can only speak state-approved, government-mandated messages that violate their faith. Infractions are punishable with fines up to $1,000 per violation and up to six months in jail.

Speech codes like this, which dictate what counselors can and cannot say depending on their views, strike at the heart of the Constitution’s free speech protections.

Bury and Eisenreich are represented by attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Their attorneys filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent enforcement of the ordinances on February 7, 2025.

On July 10, however, the district court ruled against them. ADF then appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

On July 2, 2026, a three-judge panel on the court unanimously reversed the district court’s decision in light of Chiles and ordered it to reconsider the case.

In its Chiles decision, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against an essentially identical Colorado law prohibiting counselors from engaging in “conversion therapy” with minor clients.

Justice Gorsuch wrote for the Court,

The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.
It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth.

Bury and Eisenreich are hoping to get our nation’s courts to follow the Court’s Chiles precedent in their case.

“No government should single out views they don’t like for disfavored treatment,” said ADF Senior Counsel Bryan Neihart.

“The Kansas City and Jackson County ordinances allow counselors to push kids down the dangerous path of gender transition, often leading to harmful drugs and surgeries, but they forbid counselors like Wyatt and Pamela from talking with kids to help them accept their bodies—even when that is the client’s express goal or the reason they seek the counselors’ advice.”

Neihart continued,

This is precisely what the U.S. Supreme Court so recently explained isn’t acceptable under the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court’s Chiles decision has breathed new life into efforts around the nation to protect free speech and ensure all people can receive help from licensed therapists – including when facing difficult matters like homosexuality and transgenderism.

While it may take a while for courts to apply Chiles to pending legal disputes, Bury and Eisenreich’s case is now headed in the right direction. That’s an important win for licensed counselors, struggling clients and the U.S. Constitution.

The case is Wyatt Bury v. City of Kansas City.

If you or someone you know is struggling with homosexuality or transgenderism, Focus on the Family offers a one-time complimentary consultation with our ministry’s professionally trained counseling staff. The consultation is free due to generous donor support.

To reach Focus on the Family’s counseling service by phone, call 1-800-A-Family (232-6459) weekdays 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (Mountain Time). Please be prepared to leave your contact information for a counselor or chaplain to return a call to you as soon as possible. Alternatively, you can fill out our Counseling Consultation Request Form.

We also offer local referrals for licensed counselors who align with the mission and values of Focus on the Family.

Related articles and resources:

Oregon Withdraws $90K Fine Against Christian Counselor

Washington Counselor Asks Court to Protect Free Speech

The Supreme Court’s ‘Conversion Therapy’ Ruling: Four Truths You Should Know

Supreme Court Smacks Down Colorado’s ‘Conversion Therapy’ Ban in 8-1 Decision

What Is ‘Conversion Therapy’?

Photo from Alliance Defending Freedom.

NBC News Believes Saying ‘Biological Male and Female’ Deserves a Trigger Warning

Woke knows no limits on crazy. It seems every week brings new examples of how unstable some liberal minds can be. 

This week did not disappoint.

On June 30th, the morning the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision protecting female high school and college athletes from male intrusion, the NBC News’ TODAY show found it necessary to provide viewers with a trigger warning for why they were using the terms “biological male” and “biological female.”

You can see the spectacle here:

NBC News anchor Craig Melvin announced, 

Just a quick note here, the terms that we’re using here during our reporting – biological male, biological female – the high court put those terms in quotations in their decision and dissent. But just so you know, we’re using those terms from the decision itself, biological male, biological female.

NBC News is wrong here. The majority mentions “biological sex,” “biological women,” and “biological men” 175 times in their decision and concurrences. Not once do they put those words in quotation marks. They state them for the objective facts that they are. Only liberal Justices Sotomayor and Jackson put “biological sex” in quotes as if they are not actual things.

This marks the gaping chasm in how gender ideologues and normal people see reality. Biological sex is a fact that is unoffensive to anyone who is not tainted by gender ideology.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley commented about this silliness from NBC on X, explaining, “This is how the press becomes a parody of itself.”

It certainly is.

Gender ideology is shot through with the ridiculousness of being scared to speak of male and female as objective biological fact. Just last year, Australian Senator Claire Chandler asked Dr. Anna Cody, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, about the nature of biology as it concerns what it means to be a man or a woman. 

Dr. Cody responded, “Men, uh, I think we have different language that we are using. I don’t understand the term ‘biological men.’” Cody is a well-educated law school dean who serves the Australian government as the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, and she refuses to use the words “biology” or “biological.”

This is the brain melting poison of gender ideology and NBC News has demonstrated that it is infected with the disease.

No one should ever try to play along with gender ideology, even from a misplaced sense of kindness or silly “pronoun hospitality.” It results in not being able to say what a man or woman is and apologizing for using biologically factual words.

LGBT ideology created and demands this ever-descending level of cultural insanity.