Horrific case report after genital surgery *TW distress*

[Faffertea]

This link has been shared by @FOJN on the Marci Bowers thread but I feel the person involved deserves to be remembered and for the horrific injuries inflicted on them in the name of so called medical care to be known more widely so that when this house of cards finally falls these doctors are held to account.

If you read the journal article be warned there are graphic medical images at the end.

For those who cannot, this is a case report of the death of an 18 year old from complications after genital surgery. They died from overwhelming infection originating from their own bowel which was used to create a facsimile of a vagina after puberty blockers and cross sex hormones meant they didn’t have enough penile tissue to use.

Necrotising fasciitis is one of the worst post operative complications I have ever seen and this young person, just legally an adult had 60% of the body area of their skin and subcutaneous tissue removed to try and treat it.

The article lists serious surgical complications as 0.6% or roughly 1 in 200 patients. That’s about the same as the failure rate of a vasectomy and 5x higher than the most serious complication (perforation of the womb) when fitting contraceptive coils.

I am here in tears having read this case, knowing the suffering this young person will have been through. They deserve to be remembered.

This is important and doctors should not be allowed to get away with this distortion.

Record of the person who reported horrific care at the hands of Dr Sidhbh Gallagher. Discussions of graphic complications.

(This thread is back to front, the account from Rylan starts at the bottom.)

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221119153555/twitter.com/testosteronejew" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20221119153555/twitter.com/testosteronejew/

Gallagher has also got a paper out of it. Given what is reported by this ex patient of hers, do we trust her claims about 'drainless' surgery?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31192877/

I've been in a situation where surgery has been cancelled on me because of a pre-surgery complication. I didn't get to choose, the doctors made the decision. At the time I was very keen to go ahead with the surgery and I would have definitely consented to go ahead at that point. However, on reflection, the doctors were absolutely right.

I don't think it's acceptable in any medical situation for doctors to abdicate the responsibility of fully explaining the risks vs benefits and of denying options to a patient if the risks very much outweigh the benefits.

In my situation, there had been people who'd died from this complication + surgery - not many but some. I could have the surgery later on with lower risk. Surely that applies to operating on genitals on a healthy body? There simply is not good data on risk vs benefit so surely the 'do no harm' idea should apply? The risk / benefit ratio needs to be very very clearly demonstrated to be on the benefit side. It's not as if there isn't a huge amount of evidence of the downsides - JJ had it all televised for all to see.

I think anyone going for this surgery needs to not just sign a form with lots of very small writing explaining in very dry medical language the risks but actually engage with the stories of some of the people who've had negative outcomes before they consent to go ahead. Plus also have extensive counselling beforehand to see if they truly understand the lack of evidence base. Because this is important. Unless it was life or death, I wouldn't consent to experimental surgery.

The issue of informed consent is a tricky one because there is a need to balance two opposites -autonomy vs paternalism. As doctors are we here to give patients what they want even if it could harm them as long as they are informed of the risks (autonomy)? Or do we say as medical professionals we know best and refuse to do anything a patient wants if we don’t agree it’s right for them (paternalism)?

This is the crux is it not. I'm also sure (although it may have only been in USA) that there were patients who were suing medical professionals who did NOT agree to carry out these operations and to prescribe hormonal treatment, and that by not doing so they were at risk of being struck off from being allowed to practice medicine.

BIID would seem to share various parallels. Doctors don't carry out amputations on people with BIID.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-body-integrity-identity-disorder

Well. This doctor did:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127127/

Jazz Jennings is a living example of this surgery.

I think jazz was 2 or 3 when their parents decided they must be a girl due to wanting to wear a tutu and being 'girly'.

Hormone blockers ensued, and as we all know, 99% of children on hormone blockers go on to cross sex hormones.

So there was jazz, a teenager, with the face of a girl, the breasts of a woman and the genitals of prepubescent boy.

Jazz's surgeon (was it Marci Bowers at this point?), acted surprised that not allowing Jazz's penis to develop meant they couldn't do the surgery. How can they fucking be surprised? How anyone be surprised? This surgery was the surgeon's specialty, ffs.

They put jazz through some horrific things in order to try and enlarge his penis. All to no avail.

Jazz was it on this pathway at aged two.

They eventually used part of the bowel, but Jazz had to go back for more and more surgeries.

Jazz has no sexual feeling, whatsoever. Is depressed, overweight, and mentally unwell.

Of course, it doesn't help that their entire life has been consumed by the American public as a reality TV show, either.

But the surgery, this dreadful, life damaging, butchering surgery was the inevitable end of Jazz's parents being unable to cope with an effeminate boy, gleefully egged on by the medical profession.

Based on a ideology rooted in fiction, and endorsed by the president.

Jazz is another person my heart really aches for. Jazz could have worn all the frocks and lipstick in the world, without any need to interfere in puberty or the natural course of development.

Can someone consent to a procedure without being able to actually comprehend what it is they are giving up and what it is they are risking?

My feeling is that a person who wants this surgery in the first place by definition has a mental health problem and is therefore not fit to consent to it.

Jazz's surgeon (was it Marci Bowers at this point?), acted surprised that not allowing Jazz's penis to develop meant they couldn't do the surgery. How can they fucking be surprised? How anyone be surprised? This surgery was the surgeon's specialty, ffs.

Susie Green's child had this surgery done in 2009. In the TV programme about this there was a disgusting scene where Susie and her mother laughed about the lack of 'material' the surgeon had to work with.

How could Bowers be surprised about this 9 years later?

This clip of Jazz is particularly sad.

'I feel kind of all over the place and like my mind is very cluttered and not
clear and I really want to have that clarity. I really want to understand
myself and be able to read my own soul and what I want and it's just very
challenging and I think I'm kind of breaking down a little bit and spiraling
into negativity I just want to feel like myself like that's it I don't care all I want is to be happy and feel like me and I don't feel like me, ever.'

I wish Jazz peace, clarity, and happiness.

It's another situation where I really hope that all of us horrible terfs are wrong, and mistaken, and thousands of healthy children are not being harmed for no reason.

How could Bowers be surprised about this 9 years later?

The surgeon, (not sure which one it was), hand waved at Jazz's chest and said we've done you a favour there, and gestured to Jazz's crotch and said but not so much there.

Like 'oops. Silly us.'

As if it's fucking news.

Nothing could have appeared more callous and indicated that they all knew what they were doing (ie an experiment) but they just wanted to see how it would turn out.

This case was first publicised by a well-known US forum which has gathered some excellent data and stats on the true cost of this brutel 'surgery', which is entirely driven by ideology and profit, NOT by sound medicine.

This particular case truly is some Mengele-level shit.

60% skin removal is not compatible with life most times. See burn victims. This was a CHILD with a mental health problem. The doctors killed him.

I've worked in health care and seen plenty of bowel resections but I have never seen a side to side anastomosis used to join bowel together again, I've only seen the end to end technique used.

@FOJN

I didn't understand about side to side anastomosis either. End to end if one imagines a length of tubing and removing a damaged section and then just joining up the ends so that the tubing then works as before.
Side to side (as I understand) allows on going blood supply as they are still connected and I suppose is more suited to this type of procedure relocating a section of bowel. Not sure if that means a second surgery is needed later if the graft has taken?

I don't think the fact of it being a side ti side graft was the problem. Bowel surgery has very high risk for infection anyway.

I hope this is the right episode (haven't had time to scroll through and check) but one of these episodes of BBC "surgeons at the edge" have a very clear explanation of the side ti side graft that they were doing in a patient.

I think it was this one as I was fascinated by the brain surgery as they follow more than one patient in each episode.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001hjxm

If they must perform surgery, why not stick to creating a reasonable facsimile of female external genitalia rather than going for a rubbish pseudo-vagina with all the complications that involves? Let's face it, I doubt many transwomen are getting penetrative sex anyway.

You get the impression from that report that the medical team responsible would shrug and say even a tooth extraction can go wrong for a tiny percentage of people. @nilsmousehammer

Off-topic, but when I worked in ICU we had an 18-year old admitted from theatre following a wisdom teeth extraction, who went into bronchospasm from one of the anaesthetic drugs and ended up in a persistent vegetative state. I will remember that kid and their family for the rest of my life.

This, a thousand times this.

There is no logic, reason or evidence for performing genital reconstruction to create opposite sex-facsimile genitals on people at any age. It fulfils a desire, not a medical need (and sometimes/often that desire is rooted in fetishistic thinking) and the risks of complication and failure far, far outweigh any negligible benefits of so-called 'euphoria'. Jonathan Yaniv's neo-clitoris rotted off in the bath, FFS.

Yup - had a child die in Recovery after a MUA for a minor fracture (a straightforward process that usually takes 5 minutes). We never established exactly why.

All surgery carries the risk of infection - and that's getting worse, as antibiotic resistance means that not all bacterial infection can be treated. GAs for planned surgery on healthy individuals are very low risk, but not no risk.

This really should be on its own thread, so people don't miss it.

Genital surgery advocates tell us that it's surgery or death. The actual truth is that it's surgery or a healthy body.

It seems as though it's all about the fetishistic idea of having penetrative sex 'as a woman.'

And possibly attracting a heterosexual man to have it with.

It really is fucked up.

The neovagina's all about the depth, the porny look of it, and the fact that its owner won't be 'gatekeeping' it, like those bloody cis women.

The very last person to do this surgery should be a transwoman, imo. You're not going to get a greater advocate of the ideology, are you?

In the Michael Biggs episode of A Wider Lens they discuss the Dutch protocol and that one of the original puberty blockers cohort died of complications from gender affirmation surgery. Possibly this case? I think the Dutch still counted this as a successful outcome IIRC as the patient had been happy with their transition prior to surgery.

I'm sorry but this is just not right. If death is the outcome it's just clearly not ethical to include someone who died in the 'success' column. Apart from anything else they're not around to ask!

How can anything like this get past peer review?

It is for this reason that the bowel-vagina is admitted by trans people in closed forums to smell incredibly, incredibly bad.

There is a well known and infamous Reddit post by the wife of a man who'd had a neovagina created with bowel tissue. She had become addicted to Xanax because it was the only way she could physically cope with the smell of him every day and night.

I would also like to mention, your point re secretions. The vagina lubricates on arousal. Bowel tissue does not. It lubricates when food enters the lower part of the alimentary canal to allow passage of waste. the cells continue to do this even when they have been moved into the neovagina. There's a well know youtube video of a man (called Shapseshifter) who had this surgery and admitted that his boyfriend needs to ensure that he eats well several hours before they attempt to have sex as this is the only way the neovagina will lubricate.

but it smells bad.

If death is the outcome it's just clearly not ethical to include someone who died in the 'success' column.

This seems to be the way they're universally working.

Because it's not healthcare!

They're offering people the procedures they want. If they get what they want, that's a success!

How else are you going to measure success or failure?

Normal healthcare you achieve success by improving someone's health, or curing their disease. Here there's nothing to treat, so you can't use conventional measures - there's no concrete thing to gauge your success.

And "death" isn't really a failure, because you weren't trying to prevent their death. It's not that you failed to stop them dying. (Conversely not dying would not be a success).

This wasn't an attempt to prevent death that failed, it was a cosmetic treatment that had a complication. The cosmetic treatment may have been successful, aside from that complication.

Given the lack of a specific condition being treated, when looking for material measurements, the do something like Jesse Singal wrote about recently:

top surgery research where the headline finding was that kids’ scores “improved,” after receiving double mastectomies, on scales that seemed to consist mostly of items asking them whether they presently had breasts.

@potniatheron that really is vile. It doesn't make the thought of sex very appealing.