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.

I was struck, watching the Stella O'Malley documentary, by how innocent and young the transmen appeared. They were in their late teens, early 20s, but acted and talked as tho much younger.

If hormone blockers every hormone that leads to development, thereby arresting one's development, I can't see how mental function wouldn't be affected.

Apart from the sheep study, no one appears to be concerned enough to study it.

Certainly doctors won't do it, because it could result in lawsuits, and their income stream drying up.

From beginning to end, the entire issue is one of indescribable negligence.

Spot on (sadly, and appallingly).

When I first looked at this about eight years ago, there were lots of tips and tricks online telling men how to talk to their doctor in order to hide their fetish and pretend they were suffering from gender dysphoria.

Left wing news site Novara Media, whose Contributing Editor, Ash Sarkar, is (ironically) a regular guest on BBC Radio's Moral Maze, last year published and promoted a how-to guide for teens and young adults on how to manipulate the NHS into giving them sex change surgery. Tips included how to suicide bait effectively, talking points and scripted lines on how to describe genital dysphoria, and tips on which grade and specialist of healthcare professional were easiest to manipulate and why.

I wonder if the dilation is painful? I think it probably is especially if the person is less than diligent with their routine.
The nearest comparable situation I can think of is patients with a gastrostomy tube - a feeding tube, soft and flexible, about the thickness of a biro, that goes directly into the stomach. My department has a cohort of patients who require regular management of their tubes, they need changing from time to time and sometimes they get displaced. A small balloon filled with water keeps it in place, but sometimes the balloons burst. Before removing the tube all water is removed from the balloon but it doesn't deflate quite snug and flat against the body of the tube, just like any other balloon that has been inflated and then the air released. It always surprises me how patients find it quite - very painful removing the old tube, just the short part of passing the area with the balloon through the tract. Despite long-standing tubes and a well established tract that tiny extra width isn't easily accommodated. If the tube has been accidentally displaced and there has been nothing in place for a short period of time (a day or two) it can be quite difficult to replace a new tube. We have small tubes - dilators - in different sizes and may need to use local anaesthetic as we dilate the tract up sufficiently to pass a new tube.

So I'm thinking the same must apply to this surgically created channel.
Can't remember where I saw it, Twitter probably, but someone posted a dilatation schedule which was provided as guidance for post operative care. Let's just say it was A LOT more time consuming than cleaning and flossing your teeth twice a day. It would take real commitment and either no job or an ability to get up a couple of hours earlier than would otherwise be necessary to keep up with the schedule.

My friends have told me the dilation is excruciating.

God, no wonder Jazz Jennings didn't want to do it.

And there was Jazz's mum moaning to her mates 'she won't do her dilation when I tell her, like it's fucking learning French vocab.

I’ve spent a bit of time lurking on r/MtF on and off and I’ve seen several complaints about dilation: how time consuming it can be, how much it hurts, how hard it can be to maintain any “depth” to the neovagina - which isn’t exactly surprising, the body is constantly trying to heal a wound. A lot of post-transition patients reportedly let their dilation schedule slip if they’re not sexually active or there’s no prospect of sex on the horizon, because from what I’ve seen some of them say, the pain isn’t worth it if there’s no “reward”.

There has been at least one post-transition suicide, or strongly believed to be so, among those users a couple of years back, a young person with the username u/stupidstories. Of course it’s possible they simply stopped posting / changed username, but they’d posted at length about their profound disappointment at the result of their surgery and their suicidal ideation. It was incredibly sad watching it play out in real time.

@EmmaEmerald I follow a woman on Twitter whose surgeon used a perineal post during her hip operation which crushed and permanently damaged her clitoris leaving her unable to orgasm.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8726601/

'The incidence of local wound infections after penile inversion vaginoplasty ranges from 4.0-16.8% in current literature (Bizic, Stojanovic, & Djordjevic, 2017; Buncamper et al., 2016; Horbach et al., 2015).... The incidence of local wound infections after intestinal vaginoplasty is approximately 1-2% (Bouman et al., 2014).'

So that might be another reason for the use of intestinal method, lower infections. However, according to this review

'Twenty-one studies on intestinal vaginoplasty were included (including 894 patients in total). All studies had a retrospective design and were of low quality.'

Doesn't inspire huge confidence in any of these stats.

Left wing news site Novara Media, whose Contributing Editor, Ash Sarkar, is (ironically) a regular guest on BBC Radio's Moral Maze, last year published and promoted a how-to guide for teens and young adults on how to manipulate the NHS into giving them sex change surgery. Tips included how to suicide bait effectively, talking points and scripted lines on how to describe genital dysphoria, and tips on which grade and specialist of healthcare professional were easiest to manipulate and why.

@potniatheron this is so awful I am struggling to believe it....😢Surely they have deleted it by now, that's truly dreadful.

I've just had a browse of r/MtF fantasy thread and they all seem to identify as lesbians who fancy women

It stands to reason if bowel has been used. We all know how bad it is to have gut distension as a result of trapped gas. The bowel has lots of nerve endings and it’s meant to function in a very typical peristaltic way to pass food on through. The transplanted bit must wonder what the heck is going on.
Also, having read the book, Gut, I wonder how disruptive this surgery is now only to immune system but also brain. The gut/brain axis is now well recognised and there’s a link to depression and poorly functioning bowel. Has anyone stopped to consider that in the case of these surgeries.

I am reading this with my head in my hands - my DGC is desperate for surgery and very soon will be treated as an adult. So naive and convinced that these tales of medical problems are propaganda from the anti-trans lobby. We are trying to balance between injecting reality, but not alienating and finishing up being accused of "not understanding" and losing trust and breakdown of communication. It is desperate. Unless you are part of a family going through this it is impossible to imagine the distress.

These wretched money-grubbers who are making an income from this dreadful business are despicable. It almost feels like a game - a sort of party game - a jigsaw - which bit shall we take from where and where shall we put it? - never mind that they have no idea what the long term effects might be.

I am sickened by it all.

Has there ever been any medical ethics findings published in any of these interventions?

This was touched on briefly above, but, yes, Michael Biggs in the Wider Lens was talking about this case. He says this was the death in the original "successful" Dutch protocol study.

(I saw this on Ovarit, linking to an article in the Post Millenial, citing the Wider Lens podcast.)

FFS - why can't we just link words in a sentence any more? The markup is broken.

Links separately below.)

Biggs noted that while early puberty suppression for boys who experience childhood-onset gender dysphoria has the advantage of creating a more feminine appearance in adulthood, the major disadvantage is the penis remains that of small boy making vaginoplasty much riskier.

“Instead of using the penile tissue, they will have to use some of your colon,” explained Biggs. “Now of course, that means opening up your intestines, and that's obviously much much much riskier because then you have a different site and of course, intestines are also messy.”

Biggs went on to say that the Dutch team do not acknowledge that the young person’s death was not due to a random hospital infection but rather was an indirect consequence of puberty suppression.

https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/338650/trans-teen-died-from-vaginoplasty-complications-during-landmark-dutch-study-used

https://thepostmillennial.com/trans-teen-died-from-vaginoplasty-complications-during-landmark-dutch-study-used-to-justify-child-sex-changes

Oh god, @Mischance , that must be horrendous for your whole family. I really hope you manage to end up in a situation that avoids the surgery.

Wow, just wow.

All the time we're told pretty much the only evidence this is all based on is the Dutch protocol - held up as the reason we're doing all of this.

Whoever has managed to turn a study WHERE A CHILD DIED as a result of unnecessary surgery into such a PR win and something to base a massive industry on is pretty impressive, to be honest, in a grotesque Dr Frankenstein kind of way.

Well, it's going to to be my go to response to anyone citing the 'Dutch protocol' as some kind of reason why experimenting on children is a good idea. 'Oh yes, the study where a child died as a result of gender reassignment surgery, that study?'.

I bet the Dutch team didn't want to admit they'd killed a child with their experimental medicine. So much more soothing to their consciences to just blame it on a random infection. And this is one of the main problems, adults being unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and the law not stepping in where it should.

@Mischance sending you solidarity. Is there any chance of directing your DGC to some of the detransitioner videos? Often children won't listen to adults but will listen to peers. Maybe just have a few videos playing in the background when they're around? They'll probably be cross at you for it, but even if they only listen to a tiny bit it will open their eyes to there being a different view and it not just being adults who are sounding the alarm but people who've been through it all. Even having the Jazz Jennings tv show on - Jazz has had a lot of post-surgery complications and multiple surgeries so even for the poster child of trans children it's not been easy or risk free.

One of the things the TRAs have been very good at is convincing children that all the responsible adults in their lives are against them and every single question about transition is purely 'anti-trans' propaganda. It's pretty classic grooming and reminds me of the case studies for radicalisation in the Prevent training I've done.

I think it's also why the brave young detransitioners coming forward to tell their stories are so important, though, because it's a lot harder to dismiss them in the same way.

From a brief reading yesterday, I saw it suggested that using bowel section had lower risk of infection because it retains its own blood supply.

But again, given so much of the 'evidence' used seems to be such poor quality, I don't know how much I trust any of the assertions made by the medics involved.

Mischance

SirSamVimesCityWatch and dimorphism - thanks for the solidarity.

It is horrendous. I love my wonderful and talented DGC dearly. And watching all this is agony. Autistic spectrum (very high functioning) features here too and there is a known link between that and body dysmorphia. This makes the surgeons even more exploitative.

I think one of the attractive things to children about the trans narrative is that it's seen as a one stop solution. Doing counselling, taking time to understand how to make changes to feel better, having to wait while your body goes through puberty is just a lot more hard work and we live in an instant gratification society. Surgery promises instant gratification, but is unlikely to deliver.

The idea that a doctor can just come along and change you and then everything is better, and that the reason you're unhappy is one easily fixable thing (being trans) rather than a multi-faceted and complex set of issues (which is far more likely), is very appealing.

I remember feeling like everything was wrong as a teen. I think that's normal. It's normal to feel like you don't fit in, even the most popular children often feel this. I wish we'd tell our children this, repeatedly. And that time makes things better - you don't always feel that way.

I remember the hormonal low when I was building up to my first period. One week I felt like a happy child and the next week I felt miserable and as if everything was wrong and then bam - period. There was nothing wrong with me, though I felt there was, it was purely a hormonal thing. Looking at my DD's school's RSE resources there is maybe one line about 'hormonal changes can affect your feelings' but I think there needs to be a lot more about how miserable it can make you feel and that to some extent you do just need to try and suffer through it, like every single other human has had to do.

And of course there's a lot more about bloody 'gender identity' than about how the hormonal changes of puberty can make you feel depressed, anxious, as if you don't fit in your own body. What a failure of adult responsibility. I'm going to have to talk to the school about this again aren't I. Sigh. Feels like pushing a boulder up a hill.

Scott Nugent has just been on GB News discussing these issues

I think one of the attractive things to children about the trans narrative is that it's seen as a one stop solution. Doing counselling, taking time to understand how to make changes to feel better, having to wait while your body goes through puberty is just a lot more hard work and we live in an instant gratification society. @dimorphism

Also time passes much more slowly when you’re young. “Just” waiting until 16/18/whatever is an eternity for a teenager.

Couldn't care less, the patient was deluded and the surgeon a criminal Dr Mengele.