“I was severely, severely misled.”
Jonni Skinner is a 23 year old detransitioner from Michigan. I met him at the Life Beyond Transition conference in Washington DC earlier this year. Jonni spoke on a panel about his experience of being medically transitioned and the harm done to him as a result. Jonni’s recent testimony has gone viral on a couple of occasions. The first occasion came from 4 November last year during a Michigan House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Child Welfare. Jonni sat with his mother as they both answered questions for more than twenty minutes.
The clip which went viral was when Jonni listed the side-effects of the puberty-blocker, androgen-suppressant and cross-sex hormones he was given as a child. Jonni told the hearing that whilst on hormones he had “terrible muscle spasms, muscle atrophy… I started peeing blood.” He was also developed “spontaneous ulcers in my bladder with no pathology present, so they didn’t know why they were forming. I also had issues with sexual dysfunction at the time. Many, many intimate dysfunctions. Breast pain and fluid leakage… I used to leak so much fluid I would have circles on the outside of my shirts.” When Jonni raised this with his gender doctors, they told him it was a normal part of “womanhood”.
Jonni told the hearing that despite coming off hormones (in Dec 2023 aged 21), he has urinary incontinence and still leaks fluid from his chest, with “pain in my breasts as well as bone issues. I have bone that’s growing in my joints and my current doctors don’t understand why. They’re seeing these bony protrusions form over the past year and a half since I stopped hormones… and I still have sexual dysfunction.”
The second occasion Jonni went viral was on 7 April this year when he spoke at a California Senate Judiciary Committee hearing against Senator Scott Wiener’s bill (SB934) to ban conversion therapy (a subject due to become a live issue in the UK). The occasion was interesting as much for Wiener’s apparent discomfort during Jonni’s testimony as it was for the (powerful) two minute statement Jonni made.
During his speech, Jonni told Wiener he was a “feminine” child who discovered trans influencers online who led him to believe his life would be better if he took hormones and underwent surgery. If he didn’t his life would get “worse. Or as the doctors told my mom, I would commit suicide.”
Jonni told Wiener how gender care specialists “poisoned my body with blockers and hormones, arresting my puberty and messing with my development. The result: I’m a 23-year old gay man who has never had an orgasm and may never have one. Let that sink in… SB934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded. I could have been spared all of this if any of my therapists explored why I felt dysphoric, but they never did. They only led me to hate my body more… this Bill is an attempted workaround that will be used to silence therapists who could have helped me avoid the irreversible harms to my body and the loss of my sexual function.”
“I think I might be trans“
I caught up with Jonni over Zoom earlier this week. What was meant to be a 40 minute conversation went on for more than two hours. He is good company, smiles a lot and, in his own words, retains a “lightness of spirit”, but in reality, his life to date has not been great. He describes his demeanor as a way to “cope… because I wouldn’t really have the positions that I’ve been able to get if I was just crying all the time”.
Jonni started our interview by describing his childhood growing up in a small town in Michigan. He told me how he loved the colour pink, was attracted to make-up and liked holding hands with boys. Jonni told me adult members of his own family called him a “faggot” and church pastors tried to “pray the gay away”. Although his mother, Melissa, did her best to protect him, Jonni was severely bullied. His own, small rural community made it quite clear there was something wrong with him, and Jonni internalised this. As a result he was a withdrawn and quiet child.
Jonni was on the cusp of puberty when American culture went peak affirmative trans. There was a butch lesbian in his community, hired to help tutor Jonni with his maths. To escape the homophobia she was experiencing, she had begun to transition. At the same time Jonni was watching lots of male make-up influencers online, some of whom, like Gregory (now Gigi) Gorgeous and Stef Sanjati were also transitioning. They were telling their followers how much more authentic and real it made them feel. It had en effect. Jonni was eleven when a television series about Jazz Jennings (a boy who had been socially transitioned by his parents aged 4) was first screened. In February the following year he told his mother “I think I might be trans”.
Melissa decided the best thing to do was to take him to see a medical professional who could help him work this through. On 12 May 2016 Jonni was taken to the Gender Services Program at Michigan Medicine, which is affiliated with the University of Michigan Hospital. Over four hours he unburdened himself to Sara Wiener, the program manager, who was warm, welcoming and accepting. Her notes record “Jonathon” stating “he has always identified as a girl and his earliest memories of his gender included believing he was a girl from 2 years of age. When adults in his life told him he was a boy, he ‘suppressed’ his female gender identity. At the age of 5, he was struggling to continue to suppress his female gender identity and this led to thoughts of suicide.”
Wiener also wrote: “He reports disliking most of his body, particularly his Adam’s Apple, his hands and feet because they are larger than a girl’s hands and feet, and he dislikes the amount of hair on his body. He would like a higher voice, ovaries, a vagina, and breasts. He becomes upset when he looks in the mirror because his body does not align with his female gender identity. He denies plans to hurt himself but he reports he ‘wouldn’t be upset’ if he died.”
Wiener recommended Jonathan as suitable for cross-sex hormones after that single appointment.
Lady Brain Theory
Jonni was put into the care of Dr Daniel Shumer, an endocrinologist who is currently Medical Director of both the Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic and the Comprehensive Gender Services Program at Michigan Medicine.
In his first meeting with Shumer (as Jonni remembers it) Jonni and his mum were told that all embryos are female at conception, and the early chromosomal message to switch to male is accompanied by a wash of testosterone which sets the embryo on a male developmental path going forward. Jonni’s brain had evidently not received enough testosterone in that chromosomal switch and he therefore had a female brain in a male body. “He explained being trans is an inherent, almost neurological intersex condition, and there’s no cure for it… a brain condition.”
The best thing for it was to align Jonni’s body with his brain by putting him on a cocktail of hormones to prepare him for eventual gender affirming surgery (Jonni says by his second appointment, Shumer was already talking about an orchiectomy and feminising facial surgery). Jonni had found the scientific answer he was looking for, but Melissa was alarmed at the suggestion of medicalisation. Jonni remembers Shumer lowering the temperature by saying to Melissa: “Well, if you’re not a supportive home, we could always step in and find one.”
I asked Jonni how his mum reacted. He said: “there’s some men in my family that had fought in Vietnam and whenever I ask them about it, they get this like look on their face where they just go blank… and that was kind of like her expression.”
To complete all the tropes, Shumer allegedly also told Melissa that 60% of kids who are not allowed to transition take their own lives, inferring that medicalisation was the best chance Jonni had. Trying to resist it either meant having her son being taken away or responsibility for his likely death.
Melissa stepped quickly into line. Thirteen year old Jonni left the consultation thinking: “Oh, this is going to save my life and I can finally be normal.” He immediately changed his pronouns and around a year later adopted a new name, Scarlet, chosen by his mother from a list he presented her.
Jonni was put on spirolonactone to whack out his testosterone and then a course of oestrogen. In 2017 he was given puberty blockers (histrelin, also known as Supprelin) via an implant in his arm. He progressed to puberty as what he called an “estrogenized male”. Jonni developed “small b-cup breasts” and urinary incontinence (haematuria). He did not go back to school in his home town, beginning an itinerant lifestyle, travelling with Melissa for her work, as she effectively homeschooled him.
Eventually they settled in a more populous, liberal area (still in Michigan) and Jonni began his freshman year at high school. After years of abuse at elementary and middle school for being effeminate, he was given hell at his new school for being trans. “I had a few friendships with some girls that I met, but I was bullied a lot. And of course, I had my medical complications that were not helpful because I would like have accidents in class… so I wasn’t very popular in school.”
That was the year he started peeing blood. “You’ll see this in my medical records. My endocrinologist tried to say that it was only one episode of haematuria that resolved itself, but it was ongoing to the point that I missed out on pretty much my entire freshman year of high school. I started the year, and then I couldn’t finish it because I was in pain and I was in the hospital so much.”
The damage being done to Jonni’s body was self-evident, but the doctors would not relent. Melissa fought to get the puberty blocker implant taken out of Jonni’s arm. Within weeks of its removal weeks Jonni’s haematuria stopped. By this time the implant had been sitting in his body for more than eighteen months. To replace it Shumer prescribed more spirolonactone and a course of medroxyprogesterone. Medroxyprogesterone acetate is used in the chemical castration of sex offenders. It was this which Jonni says started his “chest leakage”.
Jonni did not complete his sophomore year. As soon as he was 16 he dropped out and took up a series of jobs waiting tables, hosting at restaurants, helping with yoga classes and working as a barista whilst studying for his General Education Development certificate. Jonni found it reasonably easy to pass as a woman and found trans friends at the liberal end of his local scene, but he was not happy. He had never considered himself a woman and never wanted to be a woman. He just wanted to fix what society wouldn’t accept about him and blend in. But now he was trans. Aged 17, he confronted Dr Shumer about this in a phone call. Jonni told Shumer that his friends talked about “trans women being so discriminated against, and all of that. And I’d be like, why would you make me a part of a discriminated class and lead me to believe that I would be more normal and more accepted? I’m not. Why would you tell me that?“
I asked Jonni how Shumer responded. “All of the concern in his voice went away. He was very monotone, and he was like… you were 13, so if there’s anybody to blame, it’s you because you chose this, and he hung up on me and I have never heard from him again.”
Detransitioning
Detransitioning was “very gradual process” for Jonni. After he turned 18 he started dating “a lot” of men. Some were porn-sick weirdos. Some were older (“much older”) with a bit of money, often divorced, who would claim they were heterosexual. The older men “would at least take me out, and would want to be seen in public with me”. The others were “just gross”. Jonni found it “physically very painful to get aroused, and I didn’t really have a drive for it. I just wanted to cuddle and talk and they wanted to be intimate all the time.”
As well as being disillusioned with his medical “care”, Jonni was not politically aligned with the trans scene where he lived. He could see the pitfalls of medicalising children and saw himself as different from the autogynephile men who suddenly declared themselves to be women and expected to be treated as such. Jonni was, in his words, “true trans”, born with a brain condition which made him that way. Expressing these distinctions was unwelcome.
At the age of 21, after discussion with the endocrinologist who replaced Dr Shumer, he decided to take time out from the hormones. “I finally just stopped. I was like… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to surrender to mother nature and see what happens. Worst case scenario, I could always retransition.” The same month, Jonni made tentative contact with Genspect, an organisation which helps detransitioners, founded by the psychotherapist Stella O’Malley.
In March 2024, the WPATH files were published. Jonni was aghast. “I started going through them and it was absolutely horrific. Some of the callousness that I was seeing from these doctors, like how they so casually would discuss sterilising their patients. I couldn’t fully understand everything in there, but from what I could understand, it definitely reflected some of the care that I had received at the University of Michigan.”
Jonni started doing more research into the transitioning of minors and the physical castration of young men. “I was like, what the fuck? I started to… it shifted my perspective. My self-concept that I had around being born in the wrong body had been slowly coming undone over the past months prior, and this just shattered it. I was like, oh, so you mean I was just lied to.”
Jonni describes the reading he did into gender medicine was like “having the blinders ripped away from me. It completely shut the doors to retransitioning. And that’s when I began to realise I was severely, severely misled.”
An Identity in Flux
Jonni asked if Genspect would interview him for their “Wider Lens” podcast series. The result is a fascinating interview conducted by Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad, a Licensed Professional Counsellor. It was published on 24 March, three weeks after the WPATH files leak. Jonni is a study of an identity in flux. He is still going by his adopted name, Scarlet, and using female pronouns. He tells Stella and Sasha “most people who know me, call me she“, but is relaxed when people call him “sir” at work. “I don’t feel now… as adverse to my birth name”, he says, “I just think it’s an unattractive name… but it doesn’t evoke any catastrophic dysphoric emotions or anything, because it’s just a name.”
Two years later, Jonni would be interviewed by another detransitioner, Soren Aldanco, again for Genspect. This time round he is calling himself Jonni and presenting as a gay man.
Whilst Jonni was detransitioning he started a long battle to get hold of his medical records from Michigan Medicine. When he finally received them in January 2025, he found they contained some troubling untruths, including what Jonni alleges is an entirely fabricated story about wanting to cut off his penis as a young child as (he apparently said he thought it was “a ‘growth’ that did not belong”). This was written into Jonni’s notes by Sara Wiener. The notes also reveal that the 13 year old Jonni’s initial diagnosis was for an endocrine disorder alongside gender dysphoria. Jonni did not have an endocrine disorder. When I ask Jonni why these oddities might have appeared in his notes, he is at a loss to explain Michigan Medicine’s motivations, speculating it might be “manipulation and money, probably.”
I pushed him on what he meant by this, and Jonni reflected. “This whole clinic was very strange, you know? Now as an adult, I look back on some of the conversations I had with the endocrinologists… The whole thing was totally inappropriate. It was a process of grooming, 100%.”
Jonni is still considering what legal routes to redress he might have. He explained how difficult that can be in the US. He is also still in pain. “I need my bones looked at as I am still developing new masses. My urinary incontinence is still very much a daily thorn in my side, despite years of physical therapy it hasn’t gotten much better. And I still have sexual dysfunction that isn’t being addressed either. I think most doctors just don’t know what to do with me.”
Jonni’s currently doing a lot of “yoga and meditation”, which is about properly integrating the mind and body whilst also strengthening his “psychological resilience”. He’s also making a living the part-time manager of a clothing store and periodically helping out at a local holiday rental company.
Ambassador Skinner
In March this year Jonni agreed to become Genspect’s first ambassador. When I ask him what that actually means, he says he wants to use his “first hand experience of living through paediatric transition to educate the public on what the actual experience is like, beyond all the affirmative fluff we typically hear from medical activists.”
He also wants “kids like I was” to be able to have “the space to grow up without an external influence making them feel as if their body is inherently wrong and needs correcting. I really can’t think of a worse thing to tell a child or vulnerable adult.”
Stella O’Malley says Genspect are lucky to have Jonni on board. She calls him “one of the most beautiful souls I know. He combines warmth, eloquence, and a gentle strength that draws people in. There is a steadiness about him, a strength and dignity, that has carried him through.”
Jonni has never left the United States, but that might change. The UK government has committed to a ban on conversion therapy, which some campaigners feel could end up outlawing non-affirmative gender therapy. Jonni’s powerful personal testimony certainly had some impact when he spoke out against Scott Wiener’s bill in California.
I ask Jonni what he’d say if he was invited to address Westminster legislators. He says he’d tell them that a conversion therapy ban “will seal the affirmative model of gender affirming care into law [and] only serve to create more kids like me, with ongoing medical problems due to hormonal interference during development. Children and adolescents need time to grow and cultivate life experiences to form a solid identity. Interfering with that by telling them their body is wrong and needs correcting will only serve to derail them. Conversion therapy is a horrific practice and gender-affirming care serves as the modern ‘new face’ of these abusive practices”.
I contacted the University of Michigan, Dr Daniel Shumer and Sara Wiener, asking them to address the points made by Jonni above. I received a response from Michigan Medicine saying “to protect patient confidentiality, we cannot provide any information about specific patient care.”
I am grateful to Jonni for his time and permission to publish some of his personal family photos. I hope he continues to get stronger.
My work on this website is entirely funded by donation. If you would like to make a one-off contribution and receive the Gender Blog newsletter and blog posts in your email inbox you can sign up here. Your email address will be stored securely and confidentially, never given to a third party and will only be used to inform you about things I think are interesting. If you have a story, please use the contact form. All messages go directly and securely to my email inbox and will be dealt with in the utmost confidence.
Leave a Reply