Back in humans, have you heard of the child Jazz Jennings? Jazz was the poster child for taking "puberty blockers". The result of that was that Jazz's genitalia didn't develop, meaning there wasn't enough tissue for the planned vaginoplasty.
For those unaware, this is an explanation of a typical vaginoplasty procedure.
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During a vaginoplasty surgery, a surgeon creates both an outer and inner vagina by using skin and tissue from a penis.
Your surgeon will use skin from the penis and scrotum to build theinner and outer labiaof the vagina
Your surgeon will create anew opening for the urethra(so you can urinate)
Your surgeon will use tissue from your foreskin to build thenew opening of the vagina(also called the introitus).
Vaginoplasty Procedure
During most vaginoplasties, your surgeon will use a skin graft to create a new vaginal canal (the inside wall of the vagina). To do this, your surgeon will take skin from your scrotum and thin it so it works well as a skin graft.
If there’s not enough skin from your scrotum to make your new vagina, then your surgeon can take extra skin from the sides of your abdomen where there won’t be a very noticeable scar.
To make your new vaginal canal, your surgeon will create a space between your rectum and bladder. Once your skin graft is inserted, your surgeon will place gauze or spongy material inside the new vaginal canal for 5 days. The gauze puts pressure on the skin graft so it grows like it should into the surrounding vaginal tissue.
This is a computer generated model of the procedure.
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Unfortunately for Jazz, there wasn't enough development there for that.
This is what happened in 2018 as a result.
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On last night's harrowing episode, we learned exactly how serious those post-op complications were. Buckle up, folks.
Jazz underwent bottom surgery over the summer, something for which she had longed all her life.
(Continues)
Unfortunately, she suffered a rare and serious complication after her operation.
"I heard something go ‘pop’ and when I looked, the whole thing had just split open," the doctor explains.
Yikes!
In a behind-the-scenes chat with TLC, Jazz explained exactly what the doctors uncovered.
"They took off the bandages and the packaging," Jazz shares. "And we found out that only 50 percent of the skin graft took."
That is ... dramatically not good.
"So, basically I had no skin," Jazz summarizes.
Most of us prefer to have skin on our genitals, and Jazz is no exception.
www.thehollywoodgossip.com/videos/jazz-jennings-explains-post-op-complications-my-vagina-fell-apar/
So Jazz had an emergency operation to repair it that year, very soon after.
But it wasn't over yet.
By 2020, a third procedure was necessary.
people.com/tv/jazz-jennings-doctors-say-she-had-a-difficult-surgical-course-with-a-severe-complication/
As a result, Jazz's surgeon, the transwoman Dr Marci Bowers, has reassessed "puberty blockers" as a course of action in teens experiencing gender dysphoria.
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But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.
In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.
Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Timespassed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”
Over the past few weeks, I have spoken at length to both women about the current direction of their field and where they feel it has gone wrong. On some issues, including their stance on puberty blockers, they raised concerns that appear to question the current health guidelines set by WPATH — which Bowers is slated to lead starting in 2022.
WPATH, for instance,recommendsthat for many gender dysphoric and gender non-conforming kids, hormonal puberty suppression begin at theearly stages of puberty. WPATH has also insisted since 2012 that puberty blockers are “fully reversible interventions.”
When I asked Anderson if she believes that psychological effects of puberty blockers are reversible, she said: “I’m not sure.” When asked whether children in the early stages of puberty should be put on blockers, Bowers said: “I’m not a fan.”
When I asked Bowers if she still thought puberty blockers were a good idea, from a surgical perspective, she said: “This is typical of medicine. We zig and then we zag, and I think maybe we zigged a little too far to the left in some cases.” She added “I think there was naivete on the part of pediatric endocrinologists who were proponents of early [puberty] blockade thinking that just this magic can happen, that surgeons can do anything.”
I asked Bowers whether she believed WPATH had been welcoming to a wide variety of doctors’ viewpoints — including those concerned about risks, skeptical of puberty blockers, and maybe even critical of some of the surgical procedures?
“There are definitely people who are trying to keep out anyone who doesn’t absolutely buy the party line that everything should be affirming, and that there’s no room for dissent,” Bowers said. “I think that’s a mistake.”
Bowers is not only among the most respected gender surgeons in the world but easily one of the most prolific: she has built or repaired more than 2,000 vaginas, the procedure known as vaginoplasty. She rose to celebrity status appearing on the hit reality-television show “I Am Jazz,” which catalogues and choreographs the life of Jazz Jennings, arguably the country’s most famous transgender teen.
In January 2019, Jeanette Jennings threw her famous daughter a “Farewell to Penis” party. Over a million viewers looked in on guests feasting on meatballs and miniature wieners in the Jennings’ Mediterranean-style Florida home. Family and friends cheered as Jazz sliced into a penis-shaped cake. The rather complicated upcoming procedure came to seem as little more than a Sweet Sixteen.
By that point, Jazz was already Timemagazine’s top 25 most influential teen, the co-author of a bestselling children’s book and theinspiration for a plastic doll. She had served as youth ambassador to the Human Rights Campaign, and she had about one million Instagram followers. Hers was no longer just a personal story but an advertisement for a lifestyle and an industry.
On the day of the procedure — dutifully recorded for Instagram — Jazz’s sister, Ari, teasingly wiggled a sausage in front of the camera. As Jazz was about to be wheeled into the operating room, she snapped her fingers and said, “Let’s do this!”
The vaginoplasty she underwent is what surgeons call a “penile inversion,” in which surgeons use the tissue from the penis and testicles to create a vaginal cavity and clitoris. With grown men, a penile inversion was eminently doable. With Jazz, it was much more difficult.
Like thousands of adolescents in America treated for gender dysphoria (severe discomfort in one’s biological sex), Jazz had been put on puberty blockers. In Jazz’s case, they began at age 11. So at age 17, Jazz’s penis was the size and sexual maturity of an 11-year-old’s. As Bowers explained to Jazz and her family ahead of the surgery, Jazz didn’t have enough penile and scrotal skin to work with. So Bowers took a swatch of Jazz’s stomach lining to complement the available tissue.
At first, Jazz’s surgery seemed to have gone fine, but soon after she said experienced “crazy pain.” She was rushed back to the hospital, where Dr. Jess Ting was waiting. “As I was getting her on the bed, I heard something go pop,” Ting said in an episode of “I Am Jazz.” Jazz’s new vagina — or neovagina, as surgeons say — had split apart.
bariweiss.substack.com/p/top-trans-doctors-blow-the-whistle