Complications from trans surgery!

When I was a student nurse I had a placement on a plastics ward. We had a lovely young woman come in for a double mastectomy. It left a very bad taste in my mouth to look after her and be a part of her procedure. She was so young and seemed to be so emotionally immature. Her family were not supportive and she described herself as being someone that just didn't 'fit' and she believed the surgery would change that. Her periods caused her a lot of distress, particularly then as she was on her period when she came for surgery and recoiled at the thought of someone having to remove her tampon for her as she couldn't bend over post surgery. After she had the procedure she became very distressed as it dawned on her that she could never change her mind if she had a change of heart. It was horrendous to watch this frail girl make decisions about herself when she struggled to navigate her own thoughts and feelings let alone anyone elses. I suspect she was on the spectrum as she struggled socially and communicatively. I do sometimes wonder why the healthcare system would put someone like her through such trauma when she barely knew who she was.
She was adamant before surgery that she was going to go abroad to get bottom surgery and after the mastectomy said she didn't know if she wanted to go ahead with that now.
I imagine it is similar for MtF trans people.

I knew the male to female surgery involved turning the penis inside out, but I had no idea about the colon tissue being used. It it their own colon tissue that's used? The recovery from taking out a chunk of colon would be hard, without the rest of the healing.

I ask because I have a stoma so know what it's like to have intestine removed! If I touch it too hard with a wetwipe it bleeds like mad, is it the same with colon tissue used in that way?! There's also no sensation / feeling in intestine - is that the case for colon tissue used in this way? Are they able to somehow use the penis nerves to give sensation or is the part made from colon not able to feel?

There was a time on MN when posts like this would not be allowed. It has taken posters on the feminism boards years of slowly plugging away and answering questions and being abused by some posters whilst remaining polite but stating facts. This thread will be moved by the morning to that board.

Doctors, nurses, academics, politicians, journalists who try to speak out about are monstered, sacked, doxxed, dragged before their ethics boards.

Places on the internet where it can be discussed are few and far between. MN is an outlier. Twitter cancelled critical voices until very recently. The Guardian won't cover it. That Daily Mail article is full of mistakes and equivocation. Schools are teaching this nonsense to kids. Politicians (cough Kier Starmer cough Stella Creasy cough actually this would be one hell of a coughing fit) claim not to know what a woman is. Tesco (!?) Is, apparently, raising money for binders!

One was being shared on Twitter that showed the phallus just below the tummy button.
These poor girls have been so fucked over.

If anybody has seen the disturbing film by David Cronenberg called Crash, it would seem that the horrific reactions of viewers and critics at the time (over 25 years ago) were misplaced - it was just that we were too naive to understand its 'normality' and 'legitimacy' at the time.

You wouldn’t chop off a healthy leg of someone who has mental health issues and claimed it was broken when it wasn’t.

This did actually happen 20 or so years ago. Everybody was aghast back then; but now, it seems like that's the route that certain people want routine medical procedures to go down.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/625680.stm

What do the trans people who believe your gender is completely separate from your sexed body think about surgery?

Do they view them the same as "transphobes", for believing that e.g. female gender must equal female body?

Flip, my post has been auto-hidden due to a link.

I was explaining that the animation I linked before was a very optimistic outcome where 18 year olds lare concerned. That procedure requires a fully-developed penis, which male children who have been on puberty blockers don't have. The workaround for male teenagers who have been on puberty blockers is the use of bowel tissue. One of the first test subjects for this died. The teenager was 18 years old.

text of abstract

We present a case of an 18-year-old transgender woman, who underwent laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty as vaginal reconstruction, and subsequently developed septic shock and multiple organ failure on the basis of an extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli. A severe progression of the necrotizing fasciitis was lethal, despite repeated surgical debridement, intravenous antibiotic use, and supportive care at the intensive care unit.

This screenshot of the full text says: Standard penile inversion surgery was not feasible due to penoscrotal hypoplasia, which resulted from previous treatment with puberty suppressing hormones.

Words cannot describe some of the horrendous phalloplasties I've seen on various sites. The surgeons should be locked up, not advertising their services.

But this is still a nightmare considering that the decision making part of the brain and fully understanding consequences isn’t fully developed until mid twenties.

What happened to Hippocratic oaths by the way? Do drs not take those any more?

But these poor people have been duped by Dr's and it's not really their responsibility, it's everyone else's

As many of them are very young, vulnerable, with serious mental health issues, we owe them a better duty of care than we're giving them right now.

It's the complete lack of understanding of the surgeries that concerns me. I've seen posts from teenage girls who really seem to believe that if they have their breasts removed and then change their minds they can take oestrogen and they'll grow back because boys can take oestrogen and grow breasts so it will work the same for a girl who has had all their breast tissue removed.

The idea that skinning all of the flesh from a persons arm, turning it into a sausage shaped piece of flesh and attaching it to their groin will result in a functional penis and attractive penis is insanity.

Or that inverting a penis and creating a deliberate wound that needs to be regularly dilated to prevent it from healing will create a functional and pain free vagina.

What kind of information are they being provided, how realistic and clear are the surgeons being before asking for consent?

I do hope this thread isn't deleted.

If everything in the gender confirmation surgery world is ethical and above board then there is no reason we can't discuss it.

It is a growing tragedy, and the fact that people are being offered these surgeries without evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks is a scandal.

An 18 year old may have a far worse future than that animation shows. That animation is the procedure if the patient has full-sized, mature genitalia. Children who progress to surgery at 18 have often been on blockers throughout their teenage years, meaning their bodies don't grow, meaning there is not enough flesh to create any kind of simulacrum of a vagina. The workaround is using bowel tissue.

One of the first patients to be a guinea pig for this died. The teenager was 18 years old.

quote from abstract

We present a case of an 18-year-old transgender woman, who underwent laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty as vaginal reconstruction, and subsequently developed septic shock and multiple organ failure on the basis of an extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli. A severe progression of the necrotizing fasciitis was lethal, despite repeated surgical debridement, intravenous antibiotic use, and supportive care at the intensive care unit.

quote from text
Standard penile inversion surgery was not feasible due to penoscrotal hypoplasia, which resulted from previous treatment with puberty suppressing hormones

archive.is/www.jpagonline.org/article/S1083-3188(16)30174-7/fulltext

This is going to end up as everyone else's fault, not the people who have gone through the surgery and assume you can have a perfectly normal working vagina fashioned out a penis. Because you can't. But these poor people have been duped by Dr's and it's not really their responsibility, it's everyone else's......

The Daily Mail, perhaps other news sources, stalks these boards perhaps they can get an article or two from this before it's deleted.

There is footage of a surgeon in the US admitting that the youngest person they had performed "top"surgery on was 12 years old.

No doubt, but it shouldn't be.

People need to know what they are advocating for when they vote in favour of trans health care and abolition of conversion therapy,

Which in the case of trans kids is talking therapy to see if these surgical interventions can be avoided.

To be fair if the NHS are doing it I tend to trust the NHS

Christ, seriously?

The naivety 🤦‍♀️

Scotland sends 16 and 17 year olds to England for mastectomies.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scottish-doctors-approved-breast-removal-for-51-trans-teenagers-qvkmz8r2c

Why are they calling it a vaginoplasty? No surgeon can create a vagina - what these men have received is basically a surgical fistula, with all the inevitable problems that come with it.

Some may say it's just semantics, but it seems to me that, whenever other body parts are involved - whether for current surgery or hoped future developments - what the patient is/would be left with is always referred to as a prosthetic arm or leg, an artificial pancreas, electrolarynx, mechanical heart etc.

Whenever it's surgery to replace the function of something that should be there, but isn't working/present, nobody is under any illusion that it's an artificial organ; but when it comes to trans surgery, it's always spoken of as creating a vagina or penis. I can't help wondering if this is deliberately done to minimise what is actually being done and to give the patient a wholly unrealistic idea and grossly false expectations.

In all due respect wth did these people expect?? There are enough risks with normal routine surgery. Never mind creating a blooming vagina in a place where a vagina is definitely not meant to go!

Many of them are very young, naive and often vulnerable. They have been cheered along for their 'brave' embracing of their trans identity. They have been told, by medical professionals and other authority figures that this is a great path for them.

And being biologically illiterate is very in right now.

They expected rainbows and glitter, they expected to hatch like butterflies. They think the people telling them this are on the right side of history. They been told than anyone saying anything different is a bigot and a terf, who hates transpeople and wants them to die.