Jonni Skinner
Detransitioner and gender medicine critic
Jonni Skinner was thirteen years old when a gender clinic at the University of Michigan placed him on cross-sex hormones following what he describes as a fabricated diagnosis. Now in his early twenties, he speaks with rare precision about what happened to him — and about the institutional machinery designed to make it inevitable.
When Jonni Skinner walked into the University of Michigan gender clinic at the age of thirteen, he left with a prescription for cross-sex hormones. Eight years later, he sits down with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to tell the full story — not as a tale of one clinic's mistake, but as an anatomy of a system built to move children through a medical pathway regardless of what their parents, or the evidence, had to say.
In I Was Thirteen When They Put Me on Estrogen (episode 39), Jonni describes how his diagnosis was fabricated and how the apparatus around him — professionals, protocols, institutional incentives — was structured to override hesitation at every turn. What emerges is a portrait of a child made maximally vulnerable by the very institutions claiming to protect him.
His testimony is striking for its clarity. Jonni does not frame his experience as exceptional bad luck; he frames it as the predictable outcome of a system engineered to silence dissent and fast-track irreversible treatment. That argument, delivered by someone who lived it from the inside at thirteen, carries a weight that no policy paper can replicate.
Beyond Gender returns to his account as a case study in institutional capture — how ideology can colonise medicine, override parental hesitation, and harm the children it was supposed to help. Jonni Skinner's testimony is among the most important first-person contributions to the current reckoning with youth gender medicine.
