I Was Thirteen When They Put Me on Estrogen - Jonni Skinner (#39)

Jonni Skinner was thirteen when a gender clinic in Michigan placed him on cross-sex hormones following what he describes as a fabricated endocrine diagnosis. Now a detransitioner, he gives testimony to practices that echo the institutional failures documented by the Cass Review: co-occurring conditions ignored, consent secured under coercion, medical records allegedly falsified. His account puts a human face on precisely what evidence-based critics of paediatric gender medicine have long argued — that affirmative care, unguarded by rigorous assessment, can cause serious and lasting harm.

Jonni Skinner grew up in rural Michigan with a diagnosis of high-functioning autism, navigating the particular difficulties of being a gay, feminine boy within a conservative religious community. When puberty brought acute distress, his mother sought help at the University of Michigan's gender clinic. What followed, Jonni now describes as systematic medical abuse: a fabricated endocrine diagnosis deployed to justify placing a thirteen-year-old on cross-sex hormones, and a subsequent misdiagnosis of tall stature used to justify higher doses intended to curtail his growth. The specific details Jonni recounts go well beyond clinical misjudgement. He describes doctors falsifying his medical records, threatening to initiate child protection proceedings against his mother unless she consented to treatment, and directing him to sex shops to obtain what were presented as treatment supplies. These are not the hallmarks of an institution that made honest but mistaken decisions. They are, if accurate, the hallmarks of one that systematically exploited the vulnerability of a child and the desperation of his family. For a British audience, the resonance with the Cass Review is direct. Published in April 2024 after four years of independent examination, the review concluded that the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine was remarkably weak, and that children had been placed on medical pathways without adequate exploration of co-occurring presentations — including autism, trauma, and emerging same-sex attraction. The review documented a clinical culture in which affirmation took precedence over assessment. Jonni's account describes that same dynamic operating in an American setting, with consequences he is still living with eight years on. NHS England responded to the Cass Review by restricting puberty blockers for gender dysphoria to clinical research settings, a policy that subsequently withstood legal challenge. The principle underpinning that decision — that children cannot be placed on experimental, potentially irreversible treatment without a credible evidence base and robust safeguarding — is one Jonni's experience illustrates with particular force. The question his story raises for the UK is whether the oversight mechanisms now being built into domestic practice are sufficient to prevent what he describes from happening here, or whether institutional pressures towards affirmation were ever truly contained by professional norms alone. Detransitioners are frequently marginalised in public debate, their accounts treated as anecdotal outliers rather than evidence. The Cass Review took a different view, explicitly calling for long-term outcome data to include the experiences of those who later regret or reverse their treatment. Jonni Skinner's willingness to speak in detail — about what was done, by whom, and what it cost him — is exactly the kind of testimony that a genuinely evidence-based reckoning with paediatric gender medicine requires. Informed consent is not an abstract principle. It is a practical question about whether a child, and their parent, were given accurate information, free from coercion, before a decision with lifelong consequences was made. On Jonni's account, none of those conditions were met.

The dossier behind this episode

Keira Bell, Bell v Tavistock and detransition in the UK

Keira Bell became the public face of a legal challenge to the former Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). Bell had received puberty-suppressing medication as an adolescent, later took testosterone and underwent surgery, and subsequently detransitioned. Together with “Mrs A”, the mother of a teenage girl, she sought judicial review of the lawfulness of the consent arrangements used when children and young people were referred for puberty blockers.

Read the evidence dossier