Last year, a series of Yelp reviews surfaced on social media, written by a young man named Yarden Silveira. Silveira was a detransitioner—a person who once identified as transgender but no longer does—who suffered severe complications from gender-related genital surgery. In these reviews, he castigated his doctors, claiming they had mistreated him.
Yarden died only two months after posting the reviews. Their discovery briefly made waves on social media, but details of Yarden’s life and death remained obscure, hidden behind multiple aliases and a vanished online presence.
Now, through investigative work and interviews with his mother, Kendra, and his aunt, Ginger, it is possible to tell his story. This evidence reveals a boy on the autism spectrum who struggled to accept his homosexuality. Health professionals facilitated his transition when he was a teenager. After traumatic surgical complications, Yarden tried to detransition, only to be rebuffed by the same medical community that had readily agreed to operate. He died at just 23, in what his mother believes was a suicide.
Yarden’s last wish was for accountability from the medical establishment. His story is a devastating testament to the failures of that establishment. Rather than help a healthy gay man come to terms with who he was, doctors “affirmed” his insecurities and led him down a path of surgery. Later, when he begged for help reversing or repairing what had been done to his body, he found only closed doors.
The timeline and assertions that follow are based on Yarden’s online posts and conversations with his family. The physicians mentioned either did not respond to comment requests or declined to comment.
Yarden was born Jorden Matthew Dykes on February 20, 1998, in Santa Clara, California. His parents separated when he was young, and his father was largely absent. His mother, Kendra, gave birth to him in her early twenties. She raised him alongside two younger daughters in modest circumstances. She later remarried briefly, with a man whom Ginger described as “abusive.”
From early childhood, Yarden showed signs of experiencing the world differently. As a baby, he would stare at ceiling fans for hours. In childhood, he developed an intense fixation with vacuum cleaners. He had been in therapy since around age five for anger and anxiety and had received multiple diagnoses, including ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder. Doctors finally identified Asperger’s syndrome (now classified under autism spectrum disorder) when he was about ten.
Ginger described Yarden as both loving and quick to anger, with a tendency to speak or act impulsively. He struggled socially, seldom making friends. He preferred instead to absorb himself in “special interests,” a behavior typical of children on the autism spectrum. At 13, he came out as gay on Facebook, triggering conflict with paternal relatives who had conservative religious views. His mother’s side, however, embraced him.
Two years later, at 15, Yarden told his mother that he was transgender. He believed that he had a “female brain”—the still-prevalent but scientifically flawed notion that transgender-identifying individuals’ brains resemble those of the opposite sex.
Kendra and Ginger recalled that transgender issues quickly became an all-consuming fixation for Yarden. Within months of announcing his transgender identity, Yarden began making plans to seek medical assistance.
By 16, Yarden had socially transitioned. He began using the name Emily, adopted female pronouns, grew out his hair, and wore feminine attire. It was 2014—the year of the “transgender tipping point.” Public awareness of trans issues was surging, and the number of children identifying as transgender spiked.
A year later, Yarden was on cross-sex hormones, prescribed by a Fresno clinic. His mother noticed that he frequently changed his name, with monikers often tied to fleeting fixations or short-lived friendships. He spent much of his time online, cycling through intense interests—social justice, genealogy, Communism.
He also began seeing a Fresno-based gender-affirming therapist, Carol Montgomery Brosnac. Yarden later claimed that Brosnac and other health professionals had encouraged his transition and fostered unrealistic expectations, setting him up for failure. “My doctors and therapists said it was possible to change genders and even recommended that I transition,” he wrote. “Given how naive I’ve always been, I genuinely believed them.”
At 18, Yarden was preparing for the next step in his transition: a penile-inversion vaginoplasty, in which an otherwise healthy penis is surgically dissected, with its tissue rearranged to construct a facsimile of a vagina. He underwent the procedure shortly after his nineteenth birthday, in early 2017, at Align Surgical Associates in San Francisco.
The surgery marked the beginning of a downward spiral. Soon afterward, he was back in the hospital with severe complications, including excessive blood loss that required a transfusion. According to medical records, Yarden developed necrosis of the “vaginal” tissue. Over 2017, he was hospitalized repeatedly to undergo corrective surgeries, including stomach-tissue grafts, in which sections of tissue from his abdomen were transplanted to replace the lost tissue.
Complication rates for penile-inversion vaginoplasty vary widely, with estimates ranging from 20 percent to 70 percent. But Yarden felt his doctors had downplayed the risks and overpromised on outcomes.
Thomas Satterwhite, a plastic surgeon and founder of Align Surgical Associates in California, performed Yarden’s vaginoplasty. Satterwhite is a leading figure at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the controversial professional association for gender medicine. He has a focus in “non-standard” genital surgeries—customized procedures that do not conform to conventional male or female anatomy.
In May 2019, Yarden underwent what he hoped would be a final revision vaginoplasty, this time performed by surgeon Maurice Garcia at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles. The procedure utilized a segment of Yarden’s colon in an attempt to replace tissue lost in previous surgeries.
Only a week later, Yarden expressed profound regret, telling Garcia that he wanted a reversal. Garcia refused to comply unless Yarden waited six months, underwent consistent therapy for at least three months, and continued with post-op dilation—despite Yarden’s desire to close the “vaginal” canal. In medical notes that Yarden later shared, Garcia wrote that Yarden showed a “lack of insight” about the “irreversible” nature of closing the surgically created canal and appeared to have “unreasonable expectations.”
Between the ages of 19 and 21, Yarden also underwent breast augmentation and facial feminization surgery—both, like his genital surgery, deemed “medically necessary” and covered by Medi-Cal, California’s publicly funded insurance program. He pinned his hopes on each successive procedure, hoping it would bring him the happiness that had eluded him. “[I]f this one surgery is a massive success,” he wrote in 2019, “then I wouldn’t have wasted so many years of my life for nothing.”
After his latest surgery failed to bring that happiness, Yarden’s optimism gave way to frustration and despair. He was in constant pain and rapidly losing faith in the doctors who had once promised to help him. As his desperation grew, he sent increasingly distressed and sometimes menacing messages to Satterwhite and Garcia. Both doctors filed restraining orders against him.
Around this time, Yarden became absorbed in religion, exploring various faiths before converting to Judaism through online courses. At the same time, he was searching for a solution to his worsening surgical complications and believed that doctors in New York could help.
Using a Birthright trip to Israel as an opportunity, Yarden took his return ticket to New York, where he spent six months homeless before securing a spot in a Brooklyn supportive-housing program. During this time, he began the process of detransitioning, adopting the name Yarden Matityahu Silveira—Yarden being the Hebrew equivalent of his birth name, Jorden.
By 2021, he had joined the Detransitioner community on Reddit using the name “Mindless-Mistake-176.” The forum was then a small community, one of the few spaces where detransitioners could share their experiences. Today, it has some 56,000 members.
Through his posts, a clearer picture of Yarden’s circumstances emerged. Struggling with chronic pain from his surgeries, he attended weekly therapy and regularly used cannabis to cope. He chronicled ongoing suffering, a sense of betrayal, and futile attempts to find medical help, detailing one doctor after another who refused to assist him.
In a post from February 2021, Yarden claimed that he had his breast implants removed by plastic surgeon Aron Kressel at Metropolitan Hospital in Manhattan. Yarden was unhappy with the result, maintaining that Kressel left him with uneven nipples and residual breast tissue. His desperation escalated; he saw plastic surgeon Alyssa R. Golas at New York University, who reportedly told him, “I can’t help you. You’re honestly the first detransitioning patient of mine.” Then, Yarden said, Miroslav Djordjevic at Mount Sinai, a specialist in sex-reassignment surgery, refused to operate without additional requirements. Shortly after, Djordjevic’s office warned Yarden to stop contacting them or face police intervention.
He approached other surgeons at Mount Sinai, who were unwilling to assist. An appointment with Frank Fang at Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery was canceled; an email from the clinic stated that it would not provide him with surgical services. He sought a consultation with Loren Schechter in Chicago—now the president-elect of WPATH—who, he claimed, acknowledged the severity of his case but declined to take him on. David M. Whitehead of Northwell Health, he said, simply wished him “the best of luck” on his “gender journey,” providing no care plan.
Around this time, Yarden began posting scathing reviews on Yelp and the doctor-review site Vitals.com about the physicians who had operated on him and those who allegedly refused to treat him. In a March 2021 review of Rachael Bluebond-Langner, he claimed that she dismissed his concerns and suggested physical therapy as a solution.
Ultimately, Yarden felt deceived by the idea that he could ever become a woman. “It isn’t possible to biologically transition from one sex to another, which really smacked me in the face when that reality became clear to me,” he wrote. He felt that he had been “lied to” from the start.
Yarden seemed to recognize that his autism may have influenced his decision to transition. “Maybe if I didn’t have autism, maybe if my brain wasn’t so defective, I would have caught on before it was too late,” he wrote.
Autism is increasingly prevalent among those who identify as transgender. Research links autism to higher rates of same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity—to behaviors, preferences, and traits atypical for one’s sex. Many autistic individuals develop strong moral convictions, spend excessive time online, and gravitate toward social justice spaces that reinforce transgender narratives. The high rates of depression and anxiety among people with autism, combined with black-and-white thinking, can lead them to believe that transitioning will solve all of their problems.
In 2016, Yarden claimed that he had been sexually assaulted by a man and was deeply distressed when some peers didn’t believe him. Autistic individuals are at higher risk of sexual assault, often because of their difficulty reading social cues, greater naïveté, and tendency to trust others too easily.
When Yarden turned 23, he should have had a long life ahead of him. Instead, he was growing hopeless. “I can’t continue living like this,” he said. In one of his final posts, he reflected on seeing a happy gay couple on the subway, acknowledging that his discomfort with his homosexual desires played a role in his decision to transition. “You just really wanted to escape the label,” he admitted.
On May 20, 2021, Yarden died in New York. The medical examiner listed “unknown circumstances” on his death certificate. According to Kendra, no autopsy was performed because some Jewish traditions discourage it.
Nonetheless, Yarden’s mother believes that he ended his own life. He had been open about suicidal thoughts. She also acknowledges that complications from his surgical issues might have played a role. Yarden described his worsening condition in graphic detail—a significant blockage caused by scar tissue and an exposed colon, which he feared could be life-threatening. Either way, his physical and mental suffering were inextricably bound together.
He was laid to rest at Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, a burial ground managed by the Hebrew Free Burial Association, which provides Jewish burials for those in need. He was buried without a tombstone.
If we can draw any lesson from Yarden’s short and painful life, it is that blind affirmation can do irreparable harm, especially for autistic or otherwise vulnerable youth who cling to the hope that adopting a transgender identity will solve their deeper struggles. When that hope shattered, Yarden was left without options, without support, and finally, without life itself.
“He was a light, and important to this world, and now the world is a little darker without him,” his mother, Kendra, told City Journal. “Yarden was so loved.”
Top Photo: Yarden Silveira at age 22, pictured in New York after his detransition