A young detransitioner has gone viral after confronting California lawmakers over their support for a pro-trans law. California SB 934, which is being sponsored by democratic State Senator Scott Weiner, is a broadly worded bill meant to allow “victims” of so-called “conversion therapy” to seek financial damages for malpractice, even years after receiving the therapy. Critics have voiced concern that the bill would allow various therapists of talk therapies to be targeted.

Detransitioner and Genspect ambassador Jonni Skinner, who transitioned to a girl at 13, attended a Senate hearing to speak out against the legislation. Skinner had been diagnosed with autism and experienced bullying for feminine interests at a young age. “The medical and mental health providers didn’t bother to ask why I felt the way I did. They poisoned my body with blockers and hormones, arresting my puberty and messing with my development. The result is I’m a 23-year-old gay man who’s never had an orgasm and may never experience one. Let that sink in,” he said during the hearing. Skinner claimed his parents were warned that he would commit suicide without the treatment.

Skinner painted a bleak picture of his medical transition. “Nipple leakage, brain fog, chest pain, depression. 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.’” Skinner claimed that proper mental health treatment could have spared him much of the pain he experienced. “In all those years, if one therapist would have just talked with me about the origins of my distress, instead of just affirming me and suggesting, you know, further medical intervention is the only solution to me, perhaps I could have been spared much of what I’m suffering with today,” he said. “And this bill, SB 934, would criminalize therapists for questioning that. They’re not able to, under this bill, question gender identity or really delve with these patients into the underlying causes of their dysphoria. That would be considered conversion therapy under SB 934,” he warned.

Skinner stopped medical interventions in 2023. He told Fox News he began questioning the interventions that had been taken. “And I had found that there was, you know, no — low quality to no evidence to doing this to me,” he said. Weiner, however, has defended the bill. “Conversion therapy is psychological torture and quack science that does nothing but harm vulnerable young people. SB 934 cracks down on that horrifying practice, but makes clear that therapists will not be penalized for good faith explorations of a patient’s gender identity or sexuality,” he said. “They will be penalized if they attempt to intentionally change a patient from any one gender or sexual orientation to another, such as from gay to straight, straight to gay, trans to cis, or cis to trans.” Skinner insisted during the hearing that the bill would create more people like him. “SB 934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded,” he said.