What is a Man?

It should be easy to be a man. It’s much harder to be a hero. Jonni Skinner is both. By David Allison

In February 2025, Matt Walsh, a man who, at best, has only a partial understanding of the transgender phenomenon, released a remarkable video entitled ‘The Taliban gets this right‘. It’s a rant about beards. According to Walsh, having a beard ‘gives you an air of authority and dignity — it makes you a serious, masculine person. It’s “the one thing that the Taliban gets right”. “Heed this,” he says: “To be a real man, grow a beard.”

A short time later, Walsh produced a second video attacking U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s announcement that there should be ‘no more beirdos’ in the U.S. military. This really gets Walsh’s goatee, but he claims he is not going to get into a fight about it as he ‘would never hit a woman.’

So, here’s the deal: a hairy man is a real man; a smooth man is tantamount to a woman.

Is there really much difference between Walsh’s feeble conception of maleness and the queer concept of gender identity? The latter “includes gradations of masculinity to femininity and maleness to femaleness, as well as identification of some individuals as having nonbinary gender, which means being essentially neither male nor female, or a combination of both.”

Sex denialism comes in diverse shapes and sizes. There are real men on the margins, and all the others (probably clean-shaven), who don’t quite meet the mark.

It was not ever thus. The 1970s were a decade of violence and social unrest. But that distant era, when I was a teenager, was also a period of playful androgyny in which, as Nina Power puts it, there was “a kind of knowing messing about with roles, while not denying the reality of sexual difference”. That freedom has since been lost “in the bid to give everything a fixed name and an identity.”

It was also in the 1970s that I was introduced to Shakespeare’s hero, Macduff, at school. He was the legendary hero who saved Scotland from Macbeth’s tyranny. Upon hearing of the murder of his family by his archenemy, he not only swears revenge, but with his ‘I must also feel it as a man’, insists that true manhood involves experiencing grief and emotional sensitivity, not just acting with aggression or petulant rage!

Jonni Skinner is that kind of hero. Video coverage of his testimony before the California Judiciary Committee went viral when he spoke out about the harms he has suffered from childhood medical transition and against a bill sponsored by Democratic Senator Scott Wiener, which would brand exploratory therapy as “conversion therapy”. Wiener visibly squirmed as Jonni retold his experiences and argued against a law that would make it all but impossible for vulnerable minors to get proper counseling.

The conceptions of maleness advocated by Walsh (right-wing, bearded) and queer theorists (left-wing, spectrum) have something undeniably fragile. Their cerebral brittleness can shatter at any moment. And the shards they produce harm people. They harmed Jonni Skinner. As he explains in this interview, he had been “essentially chemically castrated,” and his world came crashing down around him when he realized the lies he had been told.

Now that he is trying to live as the young gay man he is, he feels that the medical interventions he has been through have affected his ability to be integrated in the normal gay community: “breasts, wider hips. I will never look 100% unaltered – that would entail further (top) surgery.” But Jonni is confident: “Everyone’s appearance is different,” he says. He is standing up to the backlash from trans activists who are so fixated on appearance as to doubt whether he has had any medical interventions at all.

Like Matt Walsh, these trans activists not only betray their narrow conception of what men and women should look like, but also that the impetus for transitioning minors was never about ‘life-saving care’, but rather than passing and “being better able to deceive the world into thinking you are the opposite sex.”

Listen to Soren Aldaco’s interview with Jonni Skinner and you will hear the story of a young man who, despite describing himself as having a petite physique, has a heroic stature. He talks about how he was misled into taking a pathway of hormone treatment and surgery, and how he is fighting back. And not only for himself. As a Genspect Ambassador, he is making it his mission to get his message out, in the hope that, when people hear his and other detransitioners’ stories, they will understand how harmful so-called “gender-affirming care” is. “I hope people will start to see that there is nothing wrong with them, with how they’re born, or how they move through the world. It’s a message of self-acceptance: you’re fine just how you are; you do not need surgery or medical interventions to give you a meaningful life, to build self-confidence and self-acceptance.”

Listen to this interview! Jonni is not fragile. He is a sensitive and tough young man, with a great deal to tell us about what it means to be a real man.

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