I Was Thirteen When They Put Me on Estrogen - Jonni Skinner (#39)
18 September 2025
With Jonni Skinner
North America
Jonni Skinner was thirteen when a university gender clinic in Michigan placed him on cross-sex oestrogen after fabricating an endocrine diagnosis. His account of falsified records, coercive threats and lasting physical harm raises questions that reach well beyond the United States. Ireland's HSE has not published an independent review of its National Gender Service equivalent to the United Kingdom's Cass Review, and Skinner's testimony is a direct challenge to any health system that has not subjected paediatric gender medicine to rigorous, evidence-based scrutiny.
Jonni Skinner grew up in rural Michigan in a conservative religious household. Diagnosed with high-functioning autism at four, he describes a childhood shaped by being a feminine gay boy in an environment that offered little support for either difference. When puberty intensified that internal conflict, his mother sought help at the University of Michigan's gender clinic. What followed, Skinner now argues, was not healthcare but a systematic campaign of medical exploitation targeting a vulnerable adolescent. At thirteen, Skinner was placed on cross-sex oestrogen after clinicians recorded what he describes as a fabricated endocrine diagnosis — a justification manufactured to make the prescription appear medically indicated. At fourteen, a further misdiagnosis of tall stature was used to increase his hormone dosage and limit his height. The same clinical team, he says, threatened his mother with the removal of her son from the family home if she did not comply, falsified entries in his medical records, and directed him to sex shops for what were described as treatment supplies. Skinner spent eight years identifying as transgender before detransitioning. He is speaking publicly now to document what he regards as a structural failure: a medical institution that used ideological commitment to gender identity as cover for conduct that would, in any other clinical specialty, attract immediate regulatory scrutiny. The episode examines how autism, same-sex attraction, religious guilt and adolescent body dysmorphia were collapsed into a single gender diagnosis, closing off any alternative therapeutic pathway. The relevance to Ireland is direct. The HSE's National Gender Service at St Columcille's Hospital in Dublin has operated as the sole specialist service for adults and the primary referral point for younger patients. The Cass Review, published in the United Kingdom in 2024, found that the evidence base for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors was extremely weak and that clinical governance in gender clinics had been inadequate. Ireland has not published an equivalent independent review, and the HSE has not formally adopted the Cass findings, leaving open questions about what safeguards currently govern assessment and prescribing for minors. Informed consent is a cornerstone of Irish medical practice, governed by the Medical Council's Guide to Professional Conduct and the assisted decision-making provisions of the 2015 Act. Skinner's account raises a testable question: whether a thirteen-year-old with autism, experiencing distress about sexual orientation, can give meaningful informed consent to a course of treatment with irreversible physical consequences. That is precisely the kind of question an independent clinical review of Irish gender medicine would need to answer — and has not yet been asked publicly. Detransitioner testimony is sometimes dismissed as anecdotal or politically inconvenient. Skinner's account involves specific institutional actors, documented misdiagnoses, alleged record falsification and a coercive dynamic that researchers have identified as a systemic pattern rather than individual aberration. Whether or not every detail maps onto the Irish context, the episode makes a clear case that health systems which have not subjected their gender clinics to independent, evidence-based review are carrying risks they have not yet measured.
