The new World Professional Association for Transgender Health standards of care include this helpful appendix, listing a wide range of “gender-affirming” surgical procedures:
The thing about transition is that you can never change your sex—only approximate the appearance of the opposite sex—and that means there’s no end to the procedures you can pursue. You’ll never become, but you can keep trying!
As you address one 'problem area,' dysphoria migrates. Cut off your breasts and suddenly your hips stand out. Shave your brow and now your hairline's amiss.
As dysphoria migrates across the body, new markets for surgical intervention open up: calf implants, upper lip shortening, reduction of mandibular angle, body contouring… Because you can never turn a male into a female or a female into a male, the market for body modification is bottomless. And this is before we get to medical complications (that arise in, e.g., 70% of phalloplasties), which require further interventions.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the professionals! Last month, Reduxx reported:
Vanderbilt University’s Health Center opened its Clinic for Transgender Health in 2018, at which point it began offering a variety of “transgender” surgeries. Its gender offerings were extended into a pediatric gender clinic within its children’s hospital.
The same year as it opened, the Center’s Medical Director, Dr. Shane Taylor, gave a lecture in which she described the explicit financial benefits behind opening the gender clinic.
During the lecture, Dr. Taylor noted that elective double mastectomies can “bring in $40,000 dollars a patient” and that the surgeries “actually [make] money for the hospital.”
She went on to explain the profits the hospital could rake-in through offering vaginoplasties and phalloplasties, both of which are largely experimental, expressing that the Hospital could earn even more than initial financial analysis suggested once taking into consideration hospital stays, follow up appointments, and medications.
“Female-to-male bottom surgeries these are huge money makers,” Dr. Taylor is heard proudly proclaiming during the lecture.
The procedure Dr. Taylor is referring to is known as a phalloplasty. The complex surgery involves flaying a large graft of skin from another part of the female patient’s body — usually from the arm or thigh — and constructing a penis-shaped tube of flesh which is then surgically sewn onto the woman’s genital area to create the aesthetic of a penis.
The surgery usually requires several phases to allow the constructed ‘penis’ to perform basic functions, such as urination. It is known for having an extremely high complication rate, and has been decried as butchery even by some female-to-male transgender individuals advocating against the procedure.
If I wanted to turn myself into a man, my entire body would conspire against me: suddenly, my wrists would be too delicate, my chin too pointy, my eyebrows too high, my feet too small, my ankles too narrow, my hips too broad.
And that list will grow and grow and never end. So, again, of course the best outcome is for people to accept themselves and not wage a never-ending war on their one and only body.
For years as a teenager, I starved myself down to a skeleton. But I couldn't become pure spirit and still live. The only way out was to reconcile myself to embodiment. Gender dysphoria is no different.
Or rather, gender dysphoria should be no different. My anorexia wasn't fêted. Everybody knew there was something wrong with me just by looking at me. But we celebrate the pathological escape attempt that trans identification represents. We call it by all kinds of false names, speaking of 'true selves' that can only be unlocked by cosmetic surgery. But it’s the same impossible pursuit.
The emotionality and medicalization of the "gender debate" has obscured its consumerism. At the end of the day, children, teens, and adults seeking out gender surgeries are seen as "markets" and the messaging used with each one is just marketing. "Increasing acceptance" and "decreasing stigma" aren't just humanitarian goals, they're also marketing strategies. Legislation, also framed as a humanitarian effort, also affects consumerism. Playing off of people's emotions is also a marketing strategy and yet, our inculcation into the consumer mindset is so thorough that anyone advocating against consumption is labeled as trying to take away your "freedom" (to consume), biased or hateful (against consumption), or a conspiracy theorist. I find the conspiracy theorist label kind of funny because pharmaceuticals and surgery are multi billion dollar industries that absolutely require strategy, conferences, and a lack of transparency about what they're doing and why they're doing it. I don't know that anyone has to MAKE UP conspiracies so much as point out that these industries are CONSTANTLY strategizing about how to get your money.
Another really good article. The whole things makes me sick: Too many medical doctors have forgotten their commitment to "do no harm". To mutilate children to make a good living is truly monstrous. But the trans people are also at fault (although less so in the case of children).
I especially like these lines: "We call it by all kinds of false names, speaking of 'true selves' that can only be unlocked by cosmetic surgery. But it’s the same impossible pursuit." There are a lot of good lines in your article, but you zero in on the central irony -- that people are seeking to transform perfectly healthy bodies to release a true inner self when there is nothing that is holding them back from being themselves. What ever happened to accepting yourself as you are? Now, I could understand that a person with deformities might feel that way, since no one wants to look ugly. But I have seen pictures of men far more attractive than I was in my youth who want to become a woman, meaning that they are giving up looks that I would have loved to have in order to become an odd-looking woman (and yes, most of them look odd).
One thing that really angers me are the parents who don't love their children enough to say, "This isn't a good idea." It's bad enough that there are doctors who want to mutilate their perfectly normal children (to make money), without the parents signing on to the atrocity.
Let me talk about Douglas/Diana Goetsch, a poet that I have been critical of for a very long time. He was a middle-aged man, good-looking. He was straight. Yet, he felt inhibited and wasn't able to express his inner self as a man, so he "transitioned" -- getting all the operations, including facial feminization. So here he is, today, a heterosexual man with a fake vagina, a vagina which isn't even useful as a receptacle for semen because Goetsch is still attracted to women. But just as I would know the difference between a fake penis and a real penis (being a gay man), I wonder how much success he is having with lesbians now.
All the information that I have given here about Goetsch is public knowledge, since he published a detailed diary during his transition. Goetsch, in telling his story publicly, has contributed to the false impression that people have that transitioning is fairly simple and is a cure for personal problems. I just refuse to believe that Goetsch couldn't have learned to accept himself as he was.