Gender dysphoria is a real condition, a psychological condition, generally defined as a feeling of distress or discomfort, which happens when a person's "gender identity" differs from the sex determined genetically at conception. This is nothing new. It's been known about for decades and has, historically, generally been treated with counseling and psychological or psychiatric methods.
In more recent years, it has also been used as a flash diagnosis by activists to rush confused people, including children, into damaging and irreversible "gender-affirming" surgeries and hormone treatments. Advocates for this treatment have also claimed physical reasons for this condition, ambiguities in a person's physical makeup that can cause one to "identify" as other than their genetic sex. The problem is, too many of these gender-treatment clinics are staffed not by dispassionate, unbiased practitioners, but by activists, who are increasingly trying to cast gender dysphoria as at least in part a physical condition.
These claims are being roundly debunked.
Gender-affirming pediatricians don’t offer uncertainty. They offer the confidence of settled science: the young people who enter their clinics are “transgender,” and medical interventions, such as hormone treatments and genital surgeries, will align their brains with their bodies. While no scan or blood test can verify this diagnosis, treatment begins regardless.
In modern medicine, “being transgender” is often portrayed as a condition with biological underpinnings. This belief endures despite decades of unsuccessful searches for an objective biomarker.
These searches have been unsuccessful because there is no objective biomarker. A 1995 Dutch study, which conducted post-mortem of six men - "transgender women" - made much of the discovery of certain female patterns in the hypothalamus. But that's a canard; all six men had been on long-standing hormone therapy, which can affect physical structures in the brain. As in, permanent, irreversible changes; this is an argument against, not in favor of, these therapies.
In 1995, a Dutch team published a small postmortem study in Nature of six males who identified as women, reporting that their hypothalamic region more closely resembled the typical female pattern. This was widely considered a landmark finding. But later analyses of this study suggested that long-term cross-sex hormone use, known to alter brain structure, was the more likely explanation for the similarities found between trans-identifying people’s brains and those of the opposite sex.
Which brings us to a specific case, one Jonni Skinner, a de-transitioner.
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Jonni's case is a textbook example of a young, impressionable, confused child, taken in by charlatans.
Jonni Skinner, a detransitioner who received “gender-affirming” medical care as a child, shows the human cost of that belief. Jonni grew up in a small Michigan town with his mother and brother, moving from place to place amid an unstable home situation. At the age of four, he was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He was a sensitive and empathetic child, which made him a target for bullies.
Jonni had a devout Christian upbringing and took his faith seriously. As adolescence arrived, his emerging same-sex attraction became a monumental source of stress because he believed being gay was a sin. His anxiety quickly turned into depression.
Online and on television, he encountered a different story about boys like him. YouTube personalities Gigi Gorgeous and Stef Sanjati, and reality TV figure Jazz Jennings, were effeminate, same-sex-attracted boys whose transitions played out in public. They appeared happy, successful, and self-possessed. For Jonni, it was easy to believe that following their path might offer the same relief.
In other words, the modern media and show-business habit of endless pounding on this issue made matters worse. A boy who was already confused about his emerging sexual predilections, which, yes, can happen in the early teens, was the unwitting target of the non-stop propagandizing in the popular media. Worse still: He went into a clinic that was staffed, it seems, not be clinicians, but by advocates.
Jonni did not walk in at 13 years old convinced he was transgender; he wanted clarity about the distress he was feeling. The clinic supplied that clarity on its own terms. Jonni claims that after a single three-hour intake interview, a clinical social worker affirmed him as “transgender” and placed him on a medical track.
A medical track. At 13. Jonni ended up in the care of one Daniel Shumer, a pediatric endocrinologist. Shumer told Jonni he had a "neurological intersex condition," which, of course, is the purest horse squeeze; Jonni's issues were psychological, not physical. He recommended medical treatment. Shumer appears to have used that Dutch study as a model, even though it had already been roundly debunked; honestly, anyone who has taken Biology 101 at the college level should have seen through that bit of propagandizing.
Jonni later explained:
“So, he explained I wasn’t gay, I simply had a female brain in a boy’s body. And how the inverse happens to create a trans man,” Jonni said. He came away convinced that he “was literally in the wrong body,” and that “[a medical intervention] is the only treatment that would work.”
Here's what happened to Jonni:
Jonni’s treatment began immediately. At thirteen, in 2016, he started spironolactone and estrogen, and soon after received a puberty-blocking implant. Throughout the experience, he developed painful muscle spasms, hot flashes, persistent nausea, blood in his urine, a bladder ulcer, urinary incontinence, and fatigue. The depression, insecurity about his appearance, and social isolation he sought help for only worsened. He remained on hormones until 21, when he finally detransitioned.
Today he reports chronic bone and joint pain, reduced adult height, sexual dysfunction, and arrested psychosocial development. None of these risks, he says, were disclosed prior to treatment. Looking back, Jonni believes his distress stemmed from internalized homophobia. “I was just a kid that needed some therapy,” he says. Now 22, he speaks publicly about what he describes as malpractice and fraud in pediatric gender medicine.
If there's a better argument for banning "gender-affirming care" for children, I don't know what it might be.
Jonni may have had strong same-sex attractions. If left alone, or if properly counseled, he may have grown to be a gay man - or a heterosexual man. There is no way, now, to know. In either case, with counseling, he would have grown into a physically intact man in good health. But thanks to a self-styled "clinic" staffed not with practitioners but with activists, Jonni was caught up in a web of bad information, which led him to believe there were physical reasons for his confusion - which there were not.
There are only a few reasons, to my thinking, for government interference in the practice of medicine. Medical decisions should be made between patients and their doctors, or in the case of minors, between the patient's parents and their doctors. This matter, though, this "gender-affirming care," is surely the exception. Consenting adults may do as they wish, and much good may it do them. But as Jonni's case so clearly indicates, there is no excuse for inflicting this on children, children taken in by bad science, by faulty studies, by advocates masquerading as practitioners. This is a practice that should be halted as soon as possible.
Let children grow up, their minds and bodies intact. Stop violating primum non nocere. Stop mangling the minds and bodies of children.
