The piece examines the real-world consequences of modern transgender medical and political activism, the Supreme Court’s recent decision affecting conversion therapy bans, and California Democrats’ legislative response, centering on a survivor’s testimony about irreversible harm from gender-affirming care.
The Supreme Court’s late-March decision that Colorado’s ban on talk conversion therapy likely violated the First Amendment landed as an 8-1 ruling and sent a clear signal to states and lower courts. That outcome did not sit well with Democrats who quickly began looking for ways to blunt the ruling’s effect. In California, lawmakers have drafted what they call a “backup plan” to keep their policies in place despite the high court’s limits.
State Senator Scott Wiener and allies are pushing SB934, a bill framed as a way to let survivors sue therapists for malpractice and extend the statute of limitations dramatically. The proposal would stretch the time to file from three years to potentially three decades, allowing claims into a person’s 40s, and would permit expert testimony reflecting the scientific consensus the bill’s supporters assert. Critics see it as a legislative maneuver to chill therapists’ speech and practice after the court’s ruling on viewpoint discrimination.
Wiener had seen the writing on the wall.
The San Francisco Democrat, who previously worked as a deputy city attorney, said he’d been paying attention to the Supreme Court’s increasingly elastic interpretation of the First Amendment — from its 2010 Citizens United ruling that equated corporations to people and money to speech, to a 2017 one holding that a Colorado baker’s religious beliefs meant they could refuse filling a wedding cake order from a gay couple.
So when the high court last year took up the case of Kaley Chiles, a Christian counselor challenging Colorado’s law against using therapy to convince gay kids that they’re straight, Wiener said he invited a coalition of LGBTQ civil rights groups to plan for a future without California’s landmark conversion therapy ban.
“Once the oral argument happened last fall, it was clear to us that this law was very much at risk,” he said.
SB934 would significantly extend the window someone has to bring a malpractice suit against a conversion therapy provider from three years to potentially three decades, giving children who were harmed by a conversion therapist until they’re 40. It would also bolster such claims by allowing expert testimony that reflects the scientific consensus about the harms of sexual orientation change therapy.
From a conservative perspective, this is a clear pattern: when judges limit a preferred policy, lawmakers attempt to work around those limits with new legal tools. Democrats have embraced what they call gender-affirming care, and supporters treat any legal pushback as an assault on compassion rather than a debate about medical prudence and parental rights. That posture makes legislating responsive, evidence-based safeguards almost impossible.
There are human stories behind these policy fights, and one of the most wrenching is Jonni Skinner’s. He was an effeminate gay boy who struggled with mental health, but instead of therapy that explored the roots of his distress, he was guided straight toward medical transition. His mother questioned the approach and was threatened with losing custody, and caregivers insisted suicide was the likely outcome if he did not transition.
Skinner says the medical route left him with irreversible damage and a life he did not choose. He describes being put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which arrested normal development and caused sexual dysfunction. When complications mounted, Skinner reports his doctor stopped communicating with him, leaving him to face the consequences alone.
Skinner confronted Wiener and state Democrats about what gender-affirming care did to him.
The testimony is raw and direct, and it landed exactly where it needed to: in front of those who defend these policies.
Here’s Skinner’s full remarks:
When I was young, I was a feminine child, and I discovered trans influencers online. They said: ‘Change your body and your life gets better. Don’t and it gets worse.’
Or, as my doctors told my mom, I would commit suicide.
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.I was rendered anorgasmic because once you say you could be trans, that’s a full stop — no exploration as to why is allowed, even if you are struggling.
The former president of WPATH, Dr Marcy Bowers, the California surgeon who had performed the surgery for Jazz Jennings at 17, admitted on video that puberty blockers, followed by cross sex hormones, results in no orgasms and stunted genitals. SB, 934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded.
I could have been spared all of this, if any of my therapists would have explored why I felt dysphoric. But they never did. They only led me to hate my body more.
The Supreme Court just ruled in a rare bipartisan decision that laws like this are unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. This bill is an attempted workaround that will be used to silence therapists who could have helped me avoid the irreversible harms to my body and the loss of my sexual function as is the same for many others. So today, I ask you to extend some empathy to survivors like me and vote no for this bill.
Stories like Skinner’s are the reason many conservatives push back so strongly: they see a pattern of ideology trumping caution and common sense when it comes to children’s health. California lawmakers can call this compassion, but if policy results in lasting harm, compassion should mean stopping and reassessing, not doubling down. Accountability matters, and survivors’ testimonies deserve to shape law and practice.
Lawmakers in Sacramento face a choice: defend the rights of medical professionals and parents to question interventions, or keep insisting that every dissenting voice is bad faith. If the goal is genuinely to help kids, then real medicine and honest debate have to be allowed to happen without political veto. Otherwise, we will keep seeing more people who say they were failed by a system that picked ideology over careful care.
