30 Years After Transition, Cori Cohn Speaks Out (#32)
25 August 2025
With Cori Cohn
North America
Cori Cohn had genital surgery at nineteen in 1994, decades before gender clinics became commonplace. Thirty years on, he describes feeling neither male nor female and campaigns against youth medical transition across US states. His account of bypassing psychological safeguards by finding a willing clinician echoes the Cass Review's warnings about inadequate gatekeeping and the absence of long-term evidence for irreversible procedures.
Cori Cohn grew up in Reno, Nevada, as a sensitive, bullied boy who felt profoundly alienated from his male peers. With no social media, no school gender support groups, and no established clinical pathway, he encountered the concept of transsexualism through afternoon television. By eighteen he was taking oestrogen, and at nineteen, in 1994, he underwent genital surgery. His account is not a story of regret in the narrow sense of a decision he quickly reversed; it is a thirty-year reckoning with consequences he was not equipped, at nineteen, to foresee. What the episode makes plain is that Cohn's path to surgery depended on persistence rather than rigorous assessment. He describes consulting multiple psychologists until he found a third who would approve the procedure. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, identified precisely this vulnerability in clinical pathways: where a young person's stated identity is treated as diagnostic in itself, the risk is that clinicians who raise concerns are simply bypassed. Cohn's experience, predating today's gender clinics and occurring in a regulatory environment even less structured than those the Cass Review examined, illustrates how a determined teenager could reach irreversible surgery without the underlying distress ever being adequately explored. Thirty years on, Cohn describes himself as feeling subhuman — definitively neither male nor female — and speaks candidly about the physical consequences of surgery. He describes an impaired capacity for intimacy that makes sustaining a relationship extremely difficult. These are outcomes rarely captured in the short-term follow-up studies that were, as the Cass Review found, the basis of most clinical guidance. The review's central conclusion — that the evidence base for paediatric medical transition was remarkably weak — is thrown into sharp relief by testimony from someone who lived through the experiment at its earliest, least scrutinised phase. The episode also touches on institutional capture in American religious life. Cohn describes the Episcopal Church framing support for paediatric medical transition as a baptismal obligation, and recounts testifying against clergy-led groups encouraging young people toward transition. This mirrors patterns visible in the UK, where professional bodies, schools, and charities adopted affirmative positions that, as the Cass Review noted, were rarely grounded in evidence and frequently left families without balanced information. Since 2022, Cohn has testified before legislatures in more than two dozen US states, contributing to restrictions on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors. The legislative direction in the United States runs parallel to the policy shift in England, where NHS England withdrew routine puberty blocker prescriptions for under-eighteens and commissioned a new care model centred on holistic psychological assessment. The question Cohn's testimony keeps pressing is one the Cass Review also pressed: whether a nineteen-year-old — let alone a fourteen-year-old — can give genuinely informed consent to procedures whose consequences will shape the next thirty years of their life.
