Three young women at Savannah’s College of Art and Design (SCAD) shared images from their photo shoot with detransitioner Chloe Cole on social media. Almost immediately, they began receiving death threats from strangers online and even their own classmates.
Maggie Butera, a graphic designer and student at SCAD, heard Cole’s story and immediately became enthralled in the national debate on transgenderism. “I want[ed] her story to be told,” in a unique way, Butera told TPUSA, adding that after she messaged Cole on Instagram, she seemed “eager” to participate in the photo shoot and share her experience artistically.
“When I read about her project and her proposal for it I was really excited,” Cole told TPUSA. “She seemed very genuine and very creative.”
Cole’s physicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and began prescribing puberty blockers and testosterone (to medially transition her from female to male) at the age of 13. By 15, Cole underwent a so-called “gender-affirming” double mastectomy. Her parents, like many others, were coerced by medical professionals who told them that they could have “a dead daughter or a living son.”
By the age of 16, Cole detransitioned and began identifying as a female once again. Now 19, she has become a staunch advocate for the protection of children from a hyper-medicalized approach to treating gender dysphoria in minors. She has since filed a lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, “seeking punitive damages based on the evidence of malice, oppression and fraud,” according to her legal team.
“These treatments are more dangerous the younger you go, especially while you’re still developing. It’s something that will interfere with and stop natural processes and development of the brain, of the body, of the reproductive system,” Cole told TPUSA. “All of that is going to affect you later in life, every single part of your life, and that is not a decision that children should be equipped to make.”
“As I started talking about the regret and pain of what I had been through, a lot of people were blaming me as [the] victim, telling me that I had nobody but myself to blame,” Cole said. Following the photo shoot, she said that the “transgender community [had] a really militant response” to the project.
Butera found two other students who would be willing to collaborate with her on this project, Savannah Young, who acted as Cole’s makeup artist, and Caroline Lanier, who designed the dress made of newspaper that Cole wore and acted as her hair stylist for the photo shoot.
During a call with TPUSA, Butera explained that she spent months collecting newspaper snippets that reported on transgenderism and Cole’s several media appearances since her detransition that would eventually be used to create the primary dress for the photo shoot. “I researched transgenderism for about the last year of my life,” Butera said. She also put together the “feminine” and “masculine” outfits and acted as the photographer.
“Once we posted the photos, I lost almost every single friend I had at SCAD — not all of them, but a lot of them,” Butera told TPUSA. “I started receiving a lot of death threats, a lot of ‘kill yourself’ a lot of cyberbullying. A lot of people took art off of my website and defaced it, they photoshopped it to say things that it never said.”
“I’ve lost people that called me their best for the past 4 years … it’s been pretty brutal the backlash we received,” she added. “[W]e knew [threats] would come — speaking out on such a controversial issue.” What Butera wasn’t expecting was the response she would receive from SCAD administrators. After Butera’s home address was shared online, as well as her class schedule, and students threatened to confront her on campus, SCAD denied her request to have a safety officer escort her to and from her vehicle just once a week.
“I’m taking two online classes and one in-person,” Butera said, “People started commenting, ‘We’ve reported you to the higher-ups at SCAD,’ ‘We’re getting you expelled,’ ‘We’re getting rid of you.'” She added that many of these comments are still up on her initial Instagram post of the photo shoot with Cole.
One comment on Butera’s post, which received more than 200 “likes,” recommended “circulating the names of the students who liked this post [because] they shouldn’t be let off.”
“I read [the school administrator] some of the most heinous threats and I said, ‘I don’t feel safe to go to class, I am absolutely terrified to even leave my house. People leaked my address, me and my roommates are in the process of terminating our lease on our house.” According to Butera, the school administrator said, “Well, you know Maggie, I really don’t think you’re that scared in you’re not willing to delete the post,” and claimed that the post “promoted violence” by invoking hatred.
Lanier, who designed Cole’s dress, told TPUSA that Butera “got the brunt” of the backlash from their project, and said that she felt relatively safe going back to class in person, despite receiving some threats herself. She noted that some threats seemed implausible, and wouldn’t “come to fruition” at an arts college. She also told TPUSA that she had a lengthy phone call with SCAD administrators who asked her if she felt safe returning to class and if she had any concerns. Lanier then said that the administrator advised her to use this time to “reflect” on how this project “could affect future [employment opportunities].”
Both Lanier and Butera told TPUSA that they still appreciate the SCAD administrators’ efforts, despite their disagreement on this matter. Butera also noted that she is in the process of registering for her classes entirely online, and said that SCAD is still a “phenomenal arts school,” though “they do silence conservatives, and people who don’t agree with the left are scared to speak out there.”
In a statement provided to TPUSA regarding the photo shoot and the aftermath that followed, Young said, “If you cannot disagree with someone without threatening harm or violence, no matter how offended or hurt you are, you do not understand what it means to be truly tolerant and accepting. You can befriend and work with people you disagree with. Disagreement is not synonymous with hate.”
Researched and edited by Marisa Crate.
This piece first appeared at TPUSA.
