This week New York Magazine put Ellen Page (now known as Elliot), 39, on one of the covers of its first Men’s Style Issue. Two days earlier, the Human Rights Campaign had held its own celebration in Washington, where Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 55, delivered the keynote at the group’s 2026 National Dinner, while Marcia Gay Harden, 67, accepted the Ally for Equality award.
Yesterday we showed you the new New York Magazine cover. Today we look at the group that platformed Page at 26 and has continued to incentivize and reward celebrity transitions.
HRC’s recap calls Whitmer a proud mother of an LGBTQ+ child, and a roundup of celebrity parents says Harden has three queer and trans children.
The dinner is the newest chapter of a pattern that HRC has run for more than a decade: it finds famous people at key moments, gives them a stage, and lets their stories teach the public what to think about children and gender.
The Oscar nominee
At 20, Ellen Page earned an Oscar nomination for Juno. In February 2014, at 26, she walked onto the stage at the HRC Foundation’s Time to Thrive conference in Las Vegas and came out as gay, then told the crowd, “Thank you for inspiring me. Thank you for giving me hope,” in a room full of professionals who work with LGBTQ teenagers.
Then, on December 1, 2020, at 33, Page announced a transition and wrote that it felt remarkable “to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self,” in her own statement.
HRC president Alphonso David answered the same day with a tweet: “We are proud of you, and we love you. And we will never stop fighting alongside you for change.”
You can see for yourself just how influential and contagious this all is.
HRC platformed Ellen at 26 and praised her transition at 33, and the public tagged along, ingesting the vocabulary— self-love, authenticity, courage. The same words we hear from transgender activists today.
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The reward for telling the story
When Cher and Sonny Bono’s daughter Chastity Bono (Chaz Bono) announced a transition in June 2009 at 40, HRC issued a statement calling the move “nothing short of courageous.”
In 2012, HRC gave Larry Wachowski, then 47, its Visibility Award. Bruce Jenner (Caitlyn Jenner), 76, also belongs on the list of celebrity transitions.
HRC treats celebrity parents the same way, and it recognized Charlize Theron as an ally in 2012, and Theron later told the press her eldest child is transgender. Other stars, including Robert De Niro, Cher, Naomi Watts, and Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, have spoken about a trans-identified child. Amber Briggle, a Texas mother, helped found HRC’s Parents for Transgender Equality National Council and later became its national co-chair.
HRC’s own guide, Supporting & Caring for Transgender Children, opens with a reality-TV star Jazz Jennings, who was transitioned as a child, tells parents they have “little control” over a child’s gender identity, and advises them to work with providers to plan the transition.
Together these moves form an incentive structure, since a famous person who joins HRC’s story gets a stage, a public statement, an award, or a keynote, and a famous parent gets the same.
On and on it goes.
Who is listening
The audience is young, and it has grown fast. In 2017, the Williams Institute at UCLA, a research group that supports trans equality, estimated that 0.7 percent of U.S. teenagers, about 150,000, identified as transgender, using 2014 and 2015 data. By 2022 the estimate had reached 300,000, or 1.4 percent, and in 2025 it reached 724,000, or 3.3 percent, while 2.7 percent of adults aged 18 to 24 now identify as transgender, compared with 0.42 percent of adults aged 35 to 64. That is nearly a fivefold rise between the 2017 and 2025 reports. The institute attributes part of the early jump to better survey methods, and the numbers come from self-reported surveys, but the same institute says younger generations are more likely to identify as trans and expects the trend to continue.
Medical records point in the same direction, since Komodo Health data that Reuters analyzed showed gender dysphoria diagnoses among children aged 6 to 17 jumped 70 percent from 2020 to 2021, and puberty blocker and hormone treatment more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Reuters wrote that the cause is not clear. This all accelerated when schools closed and children spent long days online, and parents tell us the influencers filled those hours, though no study has proven or disproven that link. Chloe Cole says she first met the ideas online at 11.
A Harvard-led study offers a smaller number, and its framing deserves a close read. The researchers used private insurance claims from 2018 to 2022 and found fewer than 1,000 adolescents on blockers and fewer than 2,000 on hormones, which they present as less than 0.1 percent of teens and as evidence against claims that such care is “too freely given.” That percentage divides by every teenager with private insurance, including the great majority who never sought care, and the study takes a five-year snapshot without measuring growth.
It also leaves out Medicaid patients and families who pay cash.
The cost, and the reckoning
Chloe Cole started blockers and testosterone at 13, had a double mastectomy at 15, and at 18 sued Kaiser and her doctors for malpractice. Clementine Breen took blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and had a double mastectomy at 14, then detransitioned and at 20 sued Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Last January, a jury awarded Fox Varian $2 million over a mastectomy at 16.
Thankfully, gender clinics have begun to close, and the clinic Olson-Kennedy led shut its doors on July 22, 2025. Stanford, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s National, NYU Langone, and others stopped or changed youth programs. The hospitals cite federal pressure— that pressure grows out of the lawsuits, the whistleblowers, and the evidence reviews.
One of those reviews came from HHS, whose November 2025 report, Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices, calls the harms of blockers, hormones, and surgery in minors “significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked.” Nine researchers wrote it, including psychiatrist Kristopher Kaliebe, who co-authored our Gender Toolkit. It came as no surprise that HRC dismissed the report as a “sham report.”
HRC grades the hospitals
HRC’s Foundation also grades hospitals through its Healthcare Equality Index, which rewards top scorers with a “Leader” title. Do No Harm, an advocacy group for evidence based medicine, counted 41 children’s hospitals in the 2024 survey. HRC’s site lists Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston as a “Past Participant” and gives no years or reason. The 2024 index says its health team gets a grant from Pfizer, and Pfizer says it earned top marks from HRC. Pfizer’s annual report breaks out no testosterone sales, so I found no evidence that it profits much from this care, but a drug company funds part of the system that grades children’s hospitals.
Texas Children’s is also where surgical resident Eithan Haim blew the whistle to City Journal revealing that the hospital kept transitioning minors after it said it would stop. President Biden’s Justice Department indicted Haim in June 2024, the House Judiciary Committee said DOJ removed the lead prosecutor over undisclosed ties to the hospital, and the court dismissed the case. Earlier this year, Texas Children’s agreed to pay $10 million and open a detransition clinic.
What to teach your kids about celebrities
Kids see a movie star and assume this larger than life figure is someone to follow, a role model, the light. Talk to your kids and tell them that acting is a job and it often attracts talented, vulernable people who may become trapped in these terrible situations and goaded into decisions that may not be their own or in their own best interest.
Still, fame goes a long way. When Ellen Page announced her transition, HRC answered the same day, and fans who never read an HRC guide were suddenly inducted into the cause. Chloe Cole says she was introduced to these ideas online at 11, too young to understand the ramifications of her decisions.
That’s why (and I know I say this all the time) it is up to us parents to prepare our kids so when they encounter the ideas Chloe did, they will be prepared and ready.