30 Years After Transition, Cori Cohn Speaks Out (#32)
In 1994, Cori Cohn had genital surgery at nineteen — years before gender clinics had waiting lists and decades before the term gender identity entered everyday language. Now in his early fifties, he describes feeling neither male nor female, and has spent years testifying to US state legislatures in favour of restricting youth medical transition. As Britain absorbs the Cass Review and rebuilds its gender services from the ground up, his thirty-year account of what medicalising adolescent distress actually produces over a lifetime offers testimony that clinicians and policy-makers cannot afford to ignore.
Cori Cohn grew up in the 1980s as a sensitive, bullied boy who felt profoundly alienated from other boys. Long before gender clinics had waiting lists, and long before social transition featured in school safeguarding policies, he encountered the concept of transsexualism through afternoon television. By eighteen he was taking oestrogen; at nineteen he had undergone genital surgery. He is now in his early fifties, and the distance between that decision and his present life has become the core of his testimony. What makes Cohn's account particularly striking is the route by which he reached surgery. He approached several psychologists and eventually found a third willing to approve the procedure — a pattern that the Cass Review would later identify as a serious failure in clinical gatekeeping. The notion that a distressed teenager might seek assessments until finding approval is not simply a period curiosity. It is precisely the concern that led the NHS in England to close the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service and to restrict access to puberty blockers pending stronger evidence. Three decades on, Cohn describes feeling "subhuman" — neither male nor female. He speaks with unusual candour about the physical consequences of surgery and their lasting effects on intimate relationships. This kind of longitudinal testimony is rare. Most studies cited in favour of gender-affirming care follow patients for only a few years; Cohn's perspective spans thirty, and it does not confirm the long-term wellbeing that early-transition advocates have promised. Since 2022 he has testified before state legislatures across the United States, and his evidence has contributed to legislation restricting youth medical transition in more than two dozen states. He also reflects on the role of religious institutions in legitimising paediatric transition — an observation with a clear British parallel. The Church of England has faced its own reckoning over how to address gender identity in schools and parishes, and when Cohn describes a congregation treating support for child transition as a spiritual obligation, the echo is audible. Britain stands at a particular crossroads. The Cass Review remains the most thorough independent scrutiny any country has applied to a gender medicine service for young people. Its findings have reshaped NHS policy, closed Tavistock, and prompted new regional services to be built from the ground up. The argument has shifted from whether reform was needed to what shape it should take. Against that backdrop, the testimony of someone who received irreversible medical treatment as a teenager and has spent three decades living with the outcome is not peripheral — it is central. This episode makes no claim to resolve the wider debate. What it offers is harder to dismiss: a first-person account of what can happen when clinical rigour gives way to affirmation, and when a young person's distress is met with irreversible medicine rather than sustained psychological care. That account matters in Britain, where the system is still being rebuilt.
