The Cruelty of Denial

Trans activists shoot another messenger.

On March 17, 2026, Jonni Skinner sat before the California Assembly Health Committee and testified against bills mandating insurance coverage for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries with no meaningful age limits. Jonni is 23 years old, gay, and autistic. He was medically transitioned beginning at age 13.

“My body fell apart. Nipple leakage, brain fog, chest pain, crushing depression,” he told the committee. “I was urinating blood and had ulcers in my bladder and was too weak to attend school. When I told my doctor how sick I was, he looked at me and said, welcome to womanhood.”

Jonni’s testimony is here.

Brianna Wu Is Not Having It

Mouthy trans activist and former congressional candidate Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu, 172,000 followers) has frequently and famously whined that earlier access to medical interventions would have produced better results for him personally. He would have passed better, faced less difficulty.

Then Jonni Skinner walked into a hearing room with a different narrative, and in the Wu-verse, different narratives are most definitely not OK, in fact, they are lies.

“If you think this person has been on Estrogen since 13 and surpassed male puberty you are very, very, very, very, very, very dumb,” Wu said. “Their brow bossing, mid face length and jaw is worse than mine was. But no one will factcheck, because it tells the story you want to hear.”

Wu has acknowledged that the vast majority of feminine-presenting boys will turn out to be gay. But even in that post, regarding the group of children he characterizes as “early onset trans girls [sic] and boys that will end up just being gay,” one must ask, how do you know which 10 percent (his estimate) will turn out to be so-called true trans?

Wu’s argument for puberty blockers and HRT for minors applies directly to a gay autistic boy like Jonni who truly thought he was meant to be female. Here he is, wolfishly showing his true colors: “If you want more Hunter Schaefers, you should support access to puberty blockers.”

Another Influencer Piles On: This Didn’t Happen

“girl im sorry but you dont take puberty blockers at 13 and hormones for 7 years and end up looking like this, thats just not how that works,” babbled trans influencer @ariadotwav (~10,500 followers).

“i genuinely think this person has never touched a single miligram of estrogen or anti androgens or it was a very short period of time, or his practitioners completely screwed up his regimen. (i doubt he has ever spoken to a genuine doctor tho given how he speaks about them).”

This guy makes the same logical blunder Wu does: because the intervention did not produce the promised cosmetic outcome, the intervention must not have occurred as Jonni reports. We know this medicine works, therefore anyone who claims to have been harmed by it and doesn’t look the way we expected must be lying.

What Transitioning Minors Has Always Been About

However vexing, the fixation on Jonni’s appearance does call back to pediatric transition’s inconvenient origin story. Contrary to claims of “suicide prevention” and “life-saving care,” the impetus for transitioning minors was all about passing – about being better able to deceive the world into thinking you are the opposite sex.

As documented in The Dutch Protocol for Juvenile Transsexuals: Origins and Evidence, a critical examination of the evidentiary foundation for transitioning minors, the main architect of the protocol, Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, “believed that transsexuals would experience better outcomes if they started treatment before adulthood.” Compared to men who had transitioned later in adulthood and were distressed by not passing, starting younger would enable patients to “more easily pass in the desired gender role.”

Cohen-Kettenis acknowledged that “Prospective studies of GID [gender identity disorder] boys show that this phenomenon is more closely related to later homosexuality than to later transsexualism.” Yet this finding – replicated in many studies – was “downplayed in subsequent publications.” Of the first 70 adolescents referred to the Cohen-Kettenis’s clinic and given puberty blockers, 62 were homosexual – same-sex attracted kids who would’ve grown up to be gay or lesbian, but instead were medicalized so they could pass. The word “height” appears 23 times in the protocol’s foundational review. The words “orgasm,” “libido,” and “sexuality” do not appear at all – although it was known that this treatment could damage sexual function.

Brianna Wu’s Prior Interactions with Jonni

Brianna Wu knew Jonni’s story before he testified.

In November, Wu wrote dismissively of three female detransitioners, calling them attention-seeking, deeply mentally ill, comparable to middle-aged men having a midlife crisis— people who had bought into a “hate movement” for the attention. Jonni pointed out that although some people, like Wu, can benefit from transition, others have been truly harmed by a medical scandal. Wu implied he too was “an attention seeking mentally ill grifter.”

The next day, Wu declared that what happened to him as a child — his parents not affirming his gender dysphoria — was child abuse, and that anyone seeking to restrict such interventions wants “forced child abuse as state policy.” Jonni’s response and request to engage with Wu were summarily shut down.

In December, Wu posted that you can’t convert a trans child out of being trans any more than you can convert a gay child out of being gay. Jonni replied asking what about those who were transitioned as children with devastating effects on their lives. His final post in that exchange: “now here I am after blockers and my entire adolescence on estrogen, and I’m ruined. Its put me in such a strange position in life, socially, developmentally, medically, it’s affected every aspect of life. And I’m left now trying to move on and can’t because it’s permanent.”

Wu did not reply. He blocked Jonni. Four months later, he publicly questioned whether Jonni’s treatment had occurred at all.

What Happened to Jonni at the Gender Clinic

Doctors allegedly fabricated diagnoses — first “endocrine disorder,” then “tall stature” for a boy who stood 5’7” — to justify placing him on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, according to Jonni. While waiting for the histrelin implant to be approved by insurance, Jonni was placed on spironolactone, an anti-androgen used to suppress testosterone. Once approved, the implant followed.

Contrary to activists’ claims, this is not an unusual protocol — many patients, particularly boys, are on both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones simultaneously, their bodies subject to the compounding effects of both. Detransition researcher Exulanic pointed out in her rebuttal to Jonni’s critics that Jazz Jennings underwent this treatment, as documented on national television.

Jonni’s mother was told her son had a “female brain in a boy’s body,” warned with the now-debunked 60% suicide statistic, and threatened with the removal of her child if she refused. Jonni never signed full informed consent forms for the blockers or the hormones — only a general consent for seeing doctors.

Every symptom Jonni described — hematuria, bladder ulcers, bone loss, sexual dysfunction — appears in the known risk profiles for GnRH agonists and cross-sex estrogen in adolescents. These were foreseeable outcomes. A 13-year-old gay autistic boy was not protected from them.

Jonni dropped out of high school his sophomore year. He pursued his GED alone, sick, and increasingly isolated.

Thankfully, his mother protected him from surgery. Through every appointment where the conversation turned to facial feminization procedures, she found a way to delay. “Really, it means the world to me — more than I can say in words — her ability to protect me” Jonni said.

He eventually decided to detransition, and stopped the hormones. His full account and verified medical timeline are documented in City Journal.

A Classic Case of ‘Transing Away the Gay’

Jonni’s homosexuality was not incidental to what happened to him. It was central to it.

“Yes, it did play a major role in my transition,” he said. “I’ve spoken about my religious upbringing and homophobic environmental background — I simply did not want to conceptualize myself as being gay…these concerns were played into, if not magnified, by my providers at the time.”

He never got the chance to simply grow up as a gay boy. “I had no way of knowing whether this was a right or wrong decision for me anyway, because I never got the opportunity to try to live as a gay man first.”

Hypocrisy, Cruelty, and Speaking Out

When Jonni testified, he was already certain that reaching some legislators was beyond the point. “At first I wanted them to grasp that the bills they are putting into effect are not helping in the way they claim to be intending, and are instead causing real, egregious harm to LGBT children,” he said. “Given the behavior of some of the legislators, however, I no longer believe that they aren’t grasping it. I think they may know and simply don’t care.”

Not one legislator asked him a question about his experience, and their discussion afterward distorted what he said.

Jonni Skinner was failed the first time when a gender clinic replaced exploratory therapy with a puberty blocker, spironolactone, and a fabricated diagnosis. When the WPATH files came out in March 2024, Jonni was 21. “I understood enough to figure out — oh my God, pretty much everything I was told as a teenager was a lie,” he recalled. “The shock of that — it felt like my world came crashing down.”

He was failed a second time when legislators ignored and mischaracterized his testimony.

He was failed a third time by trans influencers who, confronted with the human cost of the interventions they champion, reach for ridicule instead of reckoning.

But Jonni plans to keep on telling his cautionary tale to legislators, to the public, and to anyone willing to listen — haters be damned – so that other vulnerable kids do not travel the same road.

“To speak about anyone putting themselves in such a vulnerable position that way — without ever trying to contact the person, or meet them to fact-check first, instead resorting to such attacks — I feel really says everything about her [Wu’s] intentions, “Jonni said. “I’m so glad that I have found the support and the inner space over the years to cultivate enough confidence in myself to not fall prey to that kind of shallow judgment anymore.”

The LGB Courage Coalition reached out to Brianna Wu and @ariadotwav for comment prior to publication. Neither responded. As is the case for many journalists and researchers covering this subject, the author is blocked by Brianna Wu on X and so contacted him via Bluesky, with no response.