Do phalloplasties actually work?

[SilverTapz]

After wondering about this for a while, I ended up searching phalloplasty online and ended up on a Reddit page where people post their progress. I had never seen one before an was curious, I guess. It was actually quite shocking. People with what looks like no muscle left on their forearms, someone with a necrotic 'scrotum', someone where the stitches were wide open and the tip has turned black and left a gaping hole etc etc. People seem to be commenting saying that they look great, they've made the right decision etc, but honestly they look absolutely butchered. It's scary. And I guess my question is, do they actually function? Some of these people are so young and it's scary what they've done to their bodies. I can't help but think a lot of them will regret the decision. Is it mainly cosmetic? Can they orgasm? Honestly just very shocked by what I've seen!

I'd say part of the reason they are putting up with it is that they believe the ideology, ie that they have been born into the wrong body. That there is a right body which can be achieved and which is rightfully theirs. That there is a definite goal or destination waiting for them if only they are willing to endure the journey after which they will achieve the prize.

I agree with your reply here @JasmineAllen
BUT, for a person who is aligned with trans ideology the starting point is that they have been born into the wrong body. Therefore they have lost the correct body and the genital surgery (in their mind) is restoring what they have lost.

omg. The fallout for these kids is going to be unbelievable. I wish any of these flippant supporters of this barbarity that pop up on here could read and digest and understand what horrors they are condoning.

Whataboutery

We do have some idea of the impact on bra8n development in that we know it lowers IQ significantly.

I know - it’s horrific when you start getting it all out to examine thoroughly. See also @ArabellaScott s post - my heart is breaking for these girls.

I remember being that age and my pure black and white thinking. I was happy to dismiss future consequences in my pursuit of what I wanted NOW. I held very strong ideas about important things for years from a very young age.

My youthful self could not have predicted the shape of my current adult life and that is fine because thank the lord, I wasn’t offered a simple solution as to why I felt a bit out of place all the time, didn’t make friends very easily and tended to fixate on certain ideas.

I grew up and mostly grew out of those feelings and came to no harm but these girls who have taken action and permanently changed their bodies to ruin their health and fertility don’t have the luxury of growing up healthy. They are going to be devastated when they understand what they have done to themselves and everyone who facilitates or condones it should be utterly ashamed. They are not kind. They are quite the opposite.

*Ah, and sorry about "sex reassignment surgery". I used it out of habit. Is "gender-affirming surgery" better?

Isn’t ‘gender affirming surgery’ what the likes of Katie Price have? To match their female body to the harmful sexist stereotypes pushed by society (aka ‘gender’)

A more accurate term for these trans surgeries is ‘extreme body modification’.

One of the things you learn from getting old is that once you've messed up a body part, it's never really going to be 100% again.

All our aching old injuries and scars and, oh yeah that wrist doesn't bend any more, I can't drink alcohol any more... Maybe you need to be young (and v naive) to believe that you can have major surgery like that and still feel ok afterwards.

And how little do you need to understand of anatomy to think that a lump of arm flesh is essentially the same as a penis? The mind boggles... Oh, don't worry about your liver failure, Mrs Brown, we'll just plumb one of your kidneys in there instead, an organ is an organ right?

I just read a bit of that reddit, and there were several similar, and similarly heartbreaking stories.

In the past ten years, so many vulnerable teens and children were sold an absolute load of horseshit about how meds and surgery would 'fix dysphoria', based on a total paucity of evidence and a total lack of questioning that was the foundation of 'affirming' healthcare.

Of those who have gone onto a path to 'transition', the majority have been made sterile, and many will have lifelong medical problems stemming from using cross sex hormones and cosmetic surgeries, and the complications of both.

I sincerely hope that most of them don't desist, because the thought of that reddit board being filled with hundreds of similar stories is just unconscionable.

"there is no structured, tested or widely accepted baseline for transgender health care."

This really stood out to me from the Scott Newgent article. Why? WTF do we allow trans health care to be more risky, with less research and follow up than any other medical sector?

If Stonewall is serious about serving the T community, this would be a useful place to start.

I have seen this discussed at some length on the kiwi farms. The consensus (as much as there is ever consensus on KF) is that either:

A) these girls are so young and totally lacking in sexual experience that they have never seen or interacted with a real penis or

B) these girls have had such awful childhood experiences of penises that they believe that they are meant to be the size of two coke cans (phalloplasty creates huge flesh rolls which are later 'debulked' in other surgeries) because in the interactions they've had with penises, the penises were that scale to them.

Either of those possibilities being true is horrifying.

I think in a few years there's going to be a LOT of lawsuits flying about.

Thank you for this link and share token. I read this and the other article by the journalist who wrote this one, which was about her own experiences. What leapt out at me from this article, which is about another trans-identified young woman, were these passages:

An undefended toilet next to a urinal is not an ideal place for a trans man to take a leak, but Ben was confident — and had to go. He walked past a guy using the urinal and quickly unzipped to sit on the toilet. The man kept his eyes to himself (the men’s room code), but as he left, he told the people waiting: “It’s going to be a while. That guy just sat down.” This was hardly an incitement to anti-trans harassment — he just thought Ben was taking a dump. Even so, as Ben sat there pretending to go, he pictured a more hostile group of drunken men and how they might react to the absence of his penis. Bathroom bills were on the rise, and every day for the rest of his life, taking a leak would mean managing risk. He was just 26 — still quite young. Looking ahead at a lifetime of this, the downsides of surgery suddenly seemed reasonable. Having a penis would help him feel safe, even if he still had to sit down in a stall. “I felt that any complication that would arise, including dying, was better than the alternative,” he says.
...

Ben’s primary goal was standing urination. He decided his next goals were penetrative sex and aesthetics, in part because he would be in a rural dating pool and would probably be the first trans guy most women had been with. At 4-foot-10 and 97 pounds, he felt he had certain disadvantages. “Women don’t like short men,” he said. “I kind of had to give myself all the edge up on the competition I could get.”

This poor, poor kid. I don't know what happened in earlier life to lead to to this result. The writer says Ben knew from a fairly young age that she was attracted to other women, but couldn't bring herself to believe she was a lesbian. Perhaps she had no role models to help with that process. There is absolutely no way at her height she will ever pass for a male, no matter how much facial hair she has or how deep her voice has become. Dating heterosexual women will be extremely challenging. Dating lesbians ditto.

It's the ultimate medicalisation of psychological and emotional distress and the ultimate externalisation of internalised misogyny.
I also wonder who is funding these multiple complex surgeries? Are individuals funding (and getting into debt++?) Or is NHS and other country equivalents paying from taxes? Are there profits made from this by clinicians or organisations? The mind boggles.

I didn't even know they did experiments on animals for this, that's barbaric.

Quite possibly some trans people might think this - people with mental illnesses think all sorts of things that don't make sense to others. For example, my daughter thought that by starving herself she would be better able to control everything going on in her life (school, exams, bullying). I also knew someone who thought they had special powers and could control things with their brain (spoiler, they didn't and they were sectioned).

However in reality no one is born in the wrong body. You are born in the body you are born in, irrespective of physical or mental illness you are unfortunate to experience.

I wonder if anyone tells someone with muscular dystrophy that they were born in the wrong body, or type 1 diabetes, or MS or cancer? It's such a facile thing to believe.

IMO trans people with body dysphoria (rather than those that have a kink/are autistic), have an unfortunate mental illness that makes them feel a disconnect from their sex. This doesn't mean that having surgery is restoring what they've lost because they never had the genitals of the opposite sex to lose in the first place. They just have a illness that makes them think they are the opposite sex and that they can imagine what its' like to be the opposite sex (which they can't and which is why you see so many TW basing their look in outworn stereotypes).

They should be treated with empathy, but not at the expense of others rights and what is fundamentally wrong (surgery that leads to terrible life long health problems). Lets face it, the vast majority of people are not going to accept them as the sex they identify as. They will be humoured for sake of politeness and/or fear but most people will consciously and subconsciously 'other' them whether they intend to or not.

Years ago, before genderwang my husband used to work with a long ago transitioned TW contractor who was well respected and good at the job. DH and others respected the TW professionally but found it unsettling because they definitely didn't see them as woman, but it was weird seeing them dressed as one. I think it was the having to pretend which made it feel odd to him.

Anyway I'm rambling now and getting off the subject :)

I’m afraid that most if not all surgical procedures have been trialled on animals at some point (happy to be corrected if someone knows otherwise), though in past times humans were often the unwitting guinea pigs. A fascinating book - The Matter of the Heart - by Thomas Morris outlines the hundreds of hours surgeons spent performing delicate heart surgery on dogs before operating on humans, particularly in the last century.

Not rambling - so many good points.
You remind me of seeing the progress pride flag fluttering over Great Ormond Street hospital and thinking what a uniquely cruel message that is to send to some of the most physically disabled and unwell children in the country. "Your bodies are flawed but a sex change will cure you".
Unfortunately the GOSH charity prioritises trans rights over the needs of vulnerable sick children.

As a trans man, I really don't get it...

"An undefended toilet next to a urinal is not an ideal place for a trans man to take a leak,"

Does this mean a toilet out in the open? I've visited quite a few men's toilets over the years, and I've never seen this configuration. The toilets have always been inside a cubicle (whose door may or may not close, granted, but cubicle still). I'm not saying it can't happen, just that it must be pretty rare, ie. not something to base such a massive decision on.

"Even so, as Ben sat there pretending to go, he pictured a more hostile group of drunken men and how they might react to the absence of his penis."

They wouldn't look, so they wouldn't know. It's in the Rules. Ben literally created the problem out of thin air.

"Bathroom bills were on the rise, and every day for the rest of his life, taking a leak would mean managing risk. He was just 26 — still quite young. Looking ahead at a lifetime of this, the downsides of surgery suddenly seemed reasonable. Having a penis would help him feel safe, even if he still had to sit down in a stall. “I felt that any complication that would arise, including dying, was better than the alternative,” he says."

This is insane! How is having to use a cubicle (and I notice that suddenly stalls are back in this story?) more difficult to face that literally DYING???

This is such a blatant example of someone hyperfixating on something, making a mountain out of a molehill :( Ben just needed some therapeutic help de-escalating this non-problem. Therapists do that all the time!

How can they work? No erectile tissue for blood to engorge. You might be able to pee standing up, but probably not. And the complications are horrendous. As to sexual function, no, they don't work for that and the surgery itself plus the hormones mean that sexual satisfaction is unlikely and total sexual dysfunction the likeliest outcome.
We read, you know!

Totally agree, @Seethlaw. Re the bathroom/WC, in the article it says that the bar Ben was visiting on the occasion of this eureka moment, there had been a problem of drug use so the management had taken down the partition walls around the toilet so there were urinals and a toilet in the same space. Sounds very grim. Not something I would say you could get away with in the ladies'!

Thank you for the explanation @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g !

Agree re stonewall. They could have been campaigning for things that would truly protect trans identifying people. If they had campaigned for proper provision in things like rape centres we’d be 10 years down the line in that process. If they had campaigned for proper research into trans identifying children there would be much better systems of support in place. And if they had campaigned for improvement in surgery people wouldn’t be having these highly risky and often unsatisfactory surgeries. They really let trans people down by just focussing on gate keeping language and pushing women aside.

Unusually, I agree with Olive on this - in a generalised sense, at least. It's a surgical culture of "Be your best self!" when your best and even your self are fully predicated on how you look - to yourself or others.

Shallow doesn't even come close to what this is: it reduces people to sets of body parts. With older women in the public eye, for instance, you can often identify how they've stopped seeing their own faces and had a blepharoplasty here, a cheek lift there and so on, with no awareness of how the whole face now works as a whole.

Men are increasingly having penis enlargement surgeries, ffs, on perfectly average organs, and six-pack implants.

The physical risks of all these surgeries are quite high, though not as frightening as the 1 in 2 risk of severe complications to GRS. The psychological risks, I would surmise, are at least as high.

If to include sperms production then probably not 🤣🤣

Erm, definitely not! No surgeon can implant working testes with sperm vesicles and all the hormonal, chromosomal, nervous and vascular connections to manufacture sperm and ejaculate seminal fluid.

You realise these are reproductive organs, right? One sex (reproductive category) cannot become the other sex.