Genspect · https://genspect.org/live-not-by-lies-reflections-on-the-2025-genspect-conference/
At thirteen, Jonni Skinner was given hormones instead of a hearing. At twenty-three he studies a body he never chose and asks who it belonged to first.
You are our Father. We are the clay, and you are our potter. We all are the work of your hand.
Isaiah 64:8
On July 1, a 23-year-old named Jonni Skinner sat down for a podcast and made a confession. At thirteen he was handed a promise: the right chemistry could fix him. A girl's brain, they said, in a boy's body. So they stalled his puberty and rewrote his hormones. Nearly a decade later he looks at a body that still carries the edits.
The promise was control. Control is the oldest lie.
We are the self-made generation: we optimize our mornings, curate our faces, hack our own sleep, and swear we are just now, finally, becoming our "true selves" — as if the self were a startup and the body a rough draft handed to us by mistake. Skinner was a gay, autistic boy in a town with one red light and a lot of contempt. He needed someone to listen. He was given a prescription.
But how do you hand a person back the decade you spent improving him?
Long before any clinic, the prophet said the plain thing we keep unlearning: we are the clay, and the hands that shaped us were never ours to hire. A pot does not remake itself on the wheel. Not earned. Not chosen. Simply given.
We did not make ourselves. That is the scandal, and the mercy.
Because if the body is the work of another hand, it was loved before it was ever a problem to solve. Before the shame. Before the diagnosis. Before the influencers and the endocrinologist and all the well-meaning wreckage. Already held. Already, the prophet insists, the work of a father's hand.
Skinner is not asking to be fixed now. He is asking to be heard.
Grace was never a cure. It is a hand that stays.