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!

Coming back to the young girls having dangerous phalloplasties. I think there is a large element of not understanding what it is not to have good health. You just need to look at TV ads to see how much of an issue continence is for older women. Older women know how debilitating even mild stress incontinence or urgency or frequency is. It is just too abstract a concept for young girls for whom continence is taken for granted. Same with urinary infections - and chronic urinary infections are a huge issue for phalloplasty as it creates pockets where chronic bacterial populations can become established.

(The lack of encouragement for older women to seek medical support for continence is also an issue, possibly made worse by women being reluctant to discuss pelvic floor issues with male health care professionals)

Absolutely, LesserCelandine. In exactly the same way asking a thirteen or fourteen year old if they want to pursue fertility preservation before sterilising themselves is next to meaningless.

'we collect comments from online news articles '

Oh, my days.

Fell down a google rabbit hole as decided to see if there are stats - apparently only 1% of breast ops (per the FDA.gov) have post operative complications (everything from slow healing, implant capsule issues, cysts etc). Can’t imagine the stats would be v different in Europe/UK. Am actually surprised at how low that figure is, but it makes the stats re phalloplasty failures/complications even more stark.

Depends what you mean by 'work' ! If someone very lucky had no complications at all they still have to manually pump up the 'erection' and obviously don't orgasm in a similar way to men, and arm skin isn't as sensitive/erogenous as penile skin.....

God, just why would anyone do that. I mean just use a strap on surely it's the same difference and much less fuss.
Are partners of women identifying as men generally lesbians or straight women, I wonder what they think of the appendage?

A lot of these women are heterosexual so would identify as gay men.

How on earth can a person who is female but has a stick on penis who then has a relationship with a female so thinks he is a gay man!

Same with a man who thinks he is female and has a relationship with a female then thinks he is a lesbian. He really isn't.

If I darken my face with makeup does that make me become black. Of course it doesn't. Neither does sticking on bits or cutting off bits and changing my name make me the opposite sex. It's all quite silly when you think about it. Also very sad since you can never be what you say you want to be.

How on earth can a person who is female but has a stick on penis who then has a relationship with a female so thinks he is a gay man!

I presume you meant ‘has a relationship with a man’. BBC 3 is busily gaslighting men with this on their show ‘I kissed a boy’ which features a young woman claiming to be a gay man.

Oh well might as well pack it up vipers. 'We' (who?) have unilaterally decided that toilets are a red herring. There's nothing to see here. Go back to chatting about weaning or something.

Dude, you're so far out of your depth it'd be funny, if this wasn't just a transparent attempt to stop people raising awareness of the mutilation of vulnerable, mostly ND, mostly gay, often abused, young people.

We can see you.

Good friend, mother to a girl. DD … develops thru childhood ….anxiety, few friends, ASD?

At yr 7/8, DD announced Bi, then within 24 mos (Covid) she announced trans and wanted to do all the buzz words - affirmating care, testosterone, top & bottom. No questions at all … this is the path to masculine enlightenment.
Wearing boy uniform at school etc. At weekends dresses like elderly country gent .. tweed jacket, tweed plus-fours, woolly high socks, old man brown walking shoes, flat cap & walking stick. She is 15.

Mum IS going thru menopause and saying to DD … do you know the long term health impacts of hormone blockers? Testosterone? Imploring DD …. Do not go thru menopause @ age 14, 15 …. Saying this to the “country gent”. Mum is supportive but firm no medical changes til 18 but knowing how easy to get meds online.

Do you think menopause + testosterone is what men feel like?

It was the willingness to go thru menopause at 14/15 & the denial of permanent health impacts most alarming. Very much seems brainwashed and unwilling to consider anything but what she’s been told on her tiny phone screen by Big Transfluencers.

DD at Uni now … she can do what she likes now.

Seriously, that this paper has drawn conclusions is remarkable.

"Therefore, we surmise that they did not consider transgender females in female bathrooms a serious concern for their constituents (unlike 50% of the men opponents)."

From this methodology:

"The author searched the Australian version of Google News (sourced between April 29 and May 16, 2015) for news and blog articles for phrases such as transgender bathroom and manually inspected a large number of web news articles and opinion pieces for comments made in relation to safety and/or privacy in female bathrooms."

Being an Australian and living in the country at that time, I can tell anyone who asks just how little this very topic was discussed or even known about there. It was not widely known at all. I would say it was unheard of in discussions between friends and socially in 2015, even among activist friends it hadn't even registered.

I would also say looking at the information I have found about this person, that they have a mathematics background, but this paper is not part of their discipline stream at all. And perhaps they have a distinctly biased motivation for generating this paper.

sites.google.com/site/rebeccajstones/

I keep coming back to this.

"In this section, we describe how we collect comments from online news articles pertaining to the safety and privacy of patrons in female bathrooms, dividing them according to
(a) the gender of the user who made the comment,
(b) whether or not the comment is a negative comment,
and (c) in the case of a negative comment, whether the comment describes a causal or incidental link between transgender females and safety and privacy in female bathrooms (or neither)."

Just to pull this out again.

"in the case of a negative comment, whether the comment describes a causal or incidental link between transgender females and safety and privacy in female bathrooms (or neither)."

As I said up thread, who the fuck, analyses public comments to new articles with the view to establish how many women and girls have been harmed by male inclusion based on whether the victims of harm mention it in their public comments? Of course women and girls are not going to be making public their instances of harm in public comments.

It is a rarity to do this even now. Yet, this paper drew this conclusion based on that criteria.

And even a)! Has this person assumed the sex of commenters? Based on what?

I mean, fuck! This paper has so many holes in it, yet apparently some organisations use papers like this to shape their response to issues such as considering toilet concerns as a 'red herring'.

But Helleofabore if we were only to know who they are and which organisation they worked for we would all be overcome with awe by their presence and defer to their obviously greater wisdom….

Wait.... so "April 29 and May 16, 2015" So for a total of 18 days? That is their sole evidence pool? 18 days? And that is the "peer reviewed research" that @MyOliveHelper said they had and preferred? 18 days?!??

Yes. We have been told that by posters in the past. We have been told this by supposed academics on MN in the past. They never seem to be able to post links that show what they claim.

Obviously, some of us hold academics and those giving vulnerable people support to a much higher standard than they do themselves. I am currently despairing at the lack of intellectual curiosity in some of the posts that I see on MN about this topic as they don't seem to be able to interrogate the logic or the information that they post.

There is this plea to their authority that because they claim to have qualifications or to be employed in this area, that they have superior access to knowledge that we don't have. It does usually end up not working for them on threads because they have overstated the merit of the information and they then get insulted. What I don't ever see happening is that they then think, oh fuck, have I got it wrong then?

Whereas, I and I think many others, read the information and think, ok, how does this work, how has this conclusion been supported and does it have merit to be included in my bank of information? I am perfectly happy to take on information if it is robustly supported, even logically, and that doesn't fail under scrutiny, or require a belief not supported by established science, to make it strong.

Actually, that was when the data was collected. I was in error.

The articles were from about a six month period and seem to be from around the world.

"Of the articles inspected, 190 contained suitable comments, from which the author collected 1035 comments. All articles were dated between 1 December 2014 and 10 May 2015 (inclusive)."

However, it was up to 2015 and the situation has moved on considerably since then.

Still catching up, but wanted to share my (admittedly derisive) hilarity at your efforts to support your points with data. You've linked to a study basing itself - in all apparent seriousness - on two weeks' worth of Google comments in 2015, when few people knew anything about transgenderism, and one I can't read without a subscription. Now you're telling us about an FOI that revealed no assault reports.

Let's consider women's reports of assaults by female-impersonating men.

Two UK women that I know of were raped in female hospital wards, then told by the hospitals that they couldn't have been raped as no men were present. One of the victims had the strength to persist and to share her experience. Hospital management doubled down on its insistence that she was 'mistaken'. The police, after talking to hospital staff, judged there was no crime. It took the woman a year of continued effort, through which she had to keep revisiting the crime against her, to achieve recognition of the truth and the apology she deserved.

Multiple groups of female NHS staff have been ordered by management to undress in front of male staff in the female changing rooms. Their unions supported the management.

Female athletes at every level have been told to welcome creepy and overbearing men in their changing facilities or lose their place on the team.

Too many women to count have lost their jobs for complaining about men in the women's toilets. Women have been ejected from pubs and clubs for the same. On social media, any woman daring to query the rights of female-impersonating men to invade their spaces and their bodies is bullied and cancelled, often having their accounts deleted by the media owners.

For years and years, mainstream media barely touched the issue due to the costs of litigation by transactivists. Vexatious litigation has been quite an effective tool in maintaining silence over any concerns about women's loss of rights to cosplaying men and their mouthpieces.

You're right that there is a dearth of data on the harms inflicted by transgenderism. That doesn't show there is no harm: it's evidence of intimidation. When victims are afraid to speak, authorities afraid to investigate and media afraid to report, there is no data; only silence.

This is something transactivism has done incredibly well - public opinion management by terror. The Stasi would be proud. Congratulations.

"In this section, we describe how we collect comments from online news articles pertaining to the safety and privacy of patrons in female bathrooms, dividing them according to (a) the gender of the user who made the comment, (b) whether or not the comment is a negative comment, and (c) in the case of a negative comment, whether the comment describes a causal or incidental link between transgender females and safety and privacy in female bathrooms (or neither)."

What steps were taken to ensure the news articles used allowed the publication of "transphobic" comments e.g. women complaining about about trans women i.e. men in women's toilets? Was it assessed if comments could be made anonymously/ pseudonymously so women were less afraid of commenting? How was 'gender' of the user commenting discerned? Self id, guess work?
What a terrible way to decide men in women's toilets is 'harmless'.

Excellent points!

Considering we know exactly how heavily moderated comments sections are, as per own experiences or just watching comments be deleted in media.

There is little to recommend this review as being anywhere near as strong to make the conclusion that was drawn.

I believe the author of the review was highly motivated to find their conclusions. I don't think that is a far stretch conclusion from looking at their work and the photos that I found.

Given that many site pre approve comments and won't publish those that point out the emperor is in the nuddy or are moderated with a heavy hand so remove such references it's a pretty pointless exercise.
If the 'gender' of the poster can be 'determined' from posts then they must need to be made with a name that is presumably checked in some way or Dave could post as Mary and no-one would be able to tell if Chris is Christopher or Christine. We know women are very, very reluctant to put comment publicly so either the sex of the poster has been confirmed which means they are identifiable and ergo unlikely to speak up or the survey has gasp assumed the gender of the commentators which is literal violence!

You're proud of 'your side' over depth of research and credibility etc - you're assuming that nobody outside of your views is educated and well read on the subject.

Whilst I come across trans people and cisgender men and women who I know definitely haven't studied the papers and journals, so very many of us have, so very many of us have first hand experience or have friends or family who have. Mostly good experiences with the odd hiccup depending on a variety of things which can happen during or after any surgery.

You think we are uneducated but the majority of us are, and many of those have read the studies. And don't just rely on hearsay or people's privately run Web blogs. I also think reddit is a terrible place to go for help or support or education, noone knows who is posting, we all know people will pose as someone fictional to drive a narrative, I won't touch reddit with a bargepole because my visits there have been full of very obvious shitposters and unreasonable people to have any discussion with.

You're proud of 'your side' over depth of research and credibility etc - you're assuming that nobody outside of your views is educated and well read on the subject.

Good research is not about sides. We don’t assume people with alternative views are not educated; we assume they are hence we ask for the evidence they are relying on. But experience shows the studies they turn to are weak, biased, or simply misrepresented time and time again.

You're proud of 'your side' over depth of research and credibility etc - you're assuming that nobody outside of your views is educated and well read on the subject.

We don’t have to assume anything, because we can read what they write, which exposes their poorly informed and incoherent reasoning.

IF they can orgasm at all … does anyone track that? Or is sex life and pleasure just not a metric for this population?

There's not much evidence as there's not much follow up, there are some studies here:

https://statsforgender.org/category/medical-transition/

sexual dysfunction after phalloplasty 54% . (Dominoni et al)

Only a single case2 of a female-to-male transitioner treated with puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones and surgeries has feen followed long-term.
The individual, who was in his thirties during the follow up, reported an inability to have a satisfying sexual life due to “shame about his genital appearance and his feelings of inadequacy in sexual matters”. The researchers concluded, that despite the gender reassignment, “in the area of intimate relationships, it may remain difficult to find a suitable partner”. (Cohen-Kettenis et al)

Figures on female-to-male transitioners are less clear. However, a clinical follow-up study2 of 38 transmen – 29 of whom had received phalloplasty, and 9 metoidioplasty – found that reported loss of orgasmic capacity was more marginally common than reported gain of orgasmic capacity. (Manrique et al)

The idea that detached arm or leg skin and muscle will become erogenous is clearly fantastic, plus tissue which has been removed, reshaped and sewn on somewhere else is not likely to be very happy to say the least. I've seen lots of transmen blithely posting about 'nerve hook up' and 'nerve regrowth'. If you've ever had any nerve damage you will know that it results in numbness, tingling,or pain, sometimes for years. It's not like plugging a lamp into an extension lead. And nerve pain can be horrific. Maybe numbness is the best outcome to be hoped for, but it's certainly not what most people would want of their genitals.

Edited, posted too soon