I’m sure all of us have wondered about the kind of surgery performed on the genitals of transsexuals who wish to undergo a full physical transition. How do they turn a penis into a vagina, and vice versa, while retaining sexual and urinary functions? I know I wondered about that after I wrote yesterday’s piece on the kind of sexual-reassignment surgery forced on Iranian gays who wish to keep their sexual orientation while preserving their lives.
For the penis-to-vagina transition, I came across a piece on the Cosmopolitan website that has an explanation, accompanied by a very enlightening animation from the European Society of Urology. Here’s some explanation:
A new video uploaded by the European Society of Urology shows a detailed example of how male-to-female gender reassignment surgery works and yes, it’s far more complex than simply removing the penis.
The animation shows a surgeon opening up the scrotum, removing the testicles, and removing the head of the penis (hello, nerve endings) to create a clitoris. The shaft and the scrotum are then used to create the labia and vaginal canal that will allow a lot of patients to have a perfectly healthy and great sex life.
Obviously, these are only the surgical changes and additional hormone therapy is necessary for a variety of other changes in the body, but watching a little animated hand transform one biological gender to another is truly fascinating.
My sicosnipophobia seems to be acting up again.
Except it’s not a vagina, it’s a prosthetic.
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I was only able to watch about 1/2 of the video that you linked to on this subject yesterday. It was a positively gruesome experience for me.
Oh, how awful it must be to live in a society w/ that kind of mindset. I don’t think I would be able to survive it.
“I was only able to watch about 1/2 of the video that you linked to on this subject yesterday. It was a positively gruesome experience for me.”
I know right, where was my trigger warning. I didn’t even need to start the video, the image of testicles being sliced open was bad enough. Heading to my safe space now to pat my kitty.
But, guys don’t have *kitties*….
At least, not until after that surgery.
🙂
Misread your comment, and thought you were referring to this video. My comment which was on this one stands.
Not watching because of cutting that part of the body bothers me. I have a similar aversion to things involving eyes. Both sensitive areas that I don’t want sharp things near.
It’s an animation, though. . .
Repeat after me – It’s only a movie, It’s only a movie, It’s only a movie…
Fascinating. It took awhile to get past the shrinkage inducing visuals, but at some point fascination set in and total immersion was the result. Science! You have gotta love it.
What I’ve learned over the past 2 years from this site, both in furthering my understanding of scientific principles, and the resulting attitudes associated with that deeper understanding of the way of things, has made me realize that this kind of procedure is beautiful. Which makes me think that whatever breakthroughs in health occur due to stem cell research, gene splicing, or whatever is the appropriate names for leading edge medicine, is quite likely majorly beneficial for the human race. We’ve overcome so much of nature to flourish in the way we have, why not follow it through to those areas that make people afraid because it’s ‘the domain of God’ or whatever. It’s proven likely there is no domain of God, only physics and the sophistication of tools we have to act on physics.
Yes. Beautiful, that level of expertise and care. As for the “shrinkage inducing”, it is a good diagnostic tool: for those of us who are not coerced, we actually want it. The diagnostician needs to explain precisely what is involved, but most of us are savvy enough to know that if you cut it off, it does not grow back.
Here’s a short video (song) on the subject by the Bee Gees:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKDY-6wR8Ww
That is fantastic. I was going to try to figure out how to work that ol’ chestnut of a urology joke into this thread. Now I am absolved. Thanks!
I’m having an uneasy feeling, with the recent theme of clickbait titles, that we are being experimented upon. (indeed a fascinating subject, though)
‘Uneasy feeling’ number 14, and he took the bate almost immediately. Impressive! I think that’s enough. We’ll run these numbers through the computer and have results early tomorrow morning.
Oh, thank you Mr. Muth. You’ve been a very cooperative subject. Your small gratuity will be in the mail soon. You also get a certificate of ‘contribution to science’ which I’m sure you will treasure for years to come.
The first part was the worst, but after a while it was just interesting. No risk of pregnancy, that’s for sure.
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I watched about one minute of the video, and then my brain made me quit watching. Thanks go to my brain.
When I first saw the title of this post, I assumed that it would be some weird evolutionary story about sequential hermaphroditism.
I was just reading about penis transplants for wounded veterans at CNN yesterday. I also remember reading about a functioning lab-grown penis on, as I recall, a rabbit in recent years. I’m blood shy, and not about to watch the video, but I wonder how long such a technique will last. I mean in twenty years will surgeons just grow a functioning reproductive tract of the sex with whom a trans person identifies? The genetic aspects would be intriguing, as in could we have chromosomally XX sperm and XY eggs if we (de)activated select genes or would they be functional only in other aspects? How would that work with presence of Bar Bodies? So many interesting questions.
I watched, but with the sort of reaction PCC foretold. Technically speaking, the procedure entails castration, but if it is necessary for a transgendered person to undergo, then I salute their courage to undergo such a procedure and I wish them happiness in their new life. However, I feel doubly sad for the Iranians who have been pressured into having a life-changing operation by a government that will not let them love other men as men.
Modern Middle-Eastern attitudes toward homosexuality were influenced by the Victorian morals imported not only by colonists but also by the native members of the elite who were educated abroad. Before the 19th century, things were very different: Middle Eastern societies roughly had a Greco/Roman attitude toward homosexuality, so the custom was for mature men to have sexual relations with young men and teenagers. Once a boy began growing a beard, he was off-limits. Roman attitudes toward sexual dominance also prevailed–a mature man could sodomize others, but it was considered unmanly if he was sodomized himself.
The Koran forbade sodomy, but it was acceptable to openly admire male beauty, especially since females were kept veiled and out of sight (this admiration was often excused as being a mystical appreciation of God’s handiwork). Additionally, punishment for homosexual acts varied depending on which law code was chosen. In the Ottoman Empire, the Hanafi law code ensured that convictions for the offense were extremely rare since they required multiple witnesses.
Now you’ve done it, Jerry, sent a significant portion of your male readership into the reach-down-and-cup maneuver, making sure that the boys are still present and accounted for.
I know I won’t be moving from the AMA-approved cross-legged protective posture the rest of the afternoon.
I’m starting to re-think my opposition on the whole “trigger warning” question.
I fully concur. I’ve been in that position since yesterday!
And those guys in the video were begging for the operation just so they wouldn’t have to endure the daily abuse that they experience every time they walked to the store to get a loaf of bread.
Whew. It’s a positively disgusting situation.
Why hasn’t anyone violently berated PCC for not giving a trigger warning?
tsk tsk
😛
After the person has healed, I wonder what sort of sensation they have in the constructed canal and what an orgasm would feel like. As a woman, my experience of an orgasm is one that is felt across my entire body as well as through the contractions. It strikes me as possibly unsatisfying to have the experience of being entered were the canal merely a canal.
I appreciate your candor on this. It’s something I’ve often wondered but would never ask about. Differences make for intrigue and questioning, except that politeness, perhaps, overrides that in some instances.
Thanks. Yes, it is a delicate topic. I presume I will be unpopular in expressing the view that reassignment surgery seems to be more about control and gender than sex. Having a constructed canal likely doesn’t feel much like having a vagina. Some women can have orgasm after orgasm. Is this something a transsexual man can experience or is the person’s orgasm a variant of what it would be with the full penis? Castrated men with canals are not women, even if we choose to view their gender as female.
And part of the reason I’m thinking about sensation is that it is very difficult for me to not perceive sexual reassignment surgery as mutilation if the person loses the ability to experience at least as much function and pleasure as they had before surgery. And while I know there are some men who want to be women, cutting the penis and then calling the remaining tip a clitoris might not afford one with more than the verisimilitude of female genitalia. Maybe that’s enough for men who desire to take on femaleness as their gender. And maybe the psychological relief of being able to more fully experience femaleness is enough to make the experience pleasurable. But in the context of this being coercive, it is an atrocity. I feel sickened by the knowledge that it’s occurring coersively.
Yes, thank you, I can still orgasm.
We tend to view “transsexual man” as discourteous. We prefer the term “trans women”. Most people humour us: eg., I was delighted with the Women’s Equality Party position on this.
I agree that where it is coercive it is vile, but we choose it. I remember the sensation of pure delight listening to my psychiatrist dictating a letter to my GP, recommending the Op.
As for penises, the clitoris naturally enlarges when trans men take T. Some have a hydraulic prosthesis attached. Googling phalloplasty, or trans man penis, will give all the information anyone needs.
@Clare, please accept my apology regarding the clumsy trans language, as I’m completing unfamiliar with the norms about how to refer to the gender for people who’ve chosen to undergo reassignment surgery.
My comments were an attempt to empathize with the forced cutting and the loss that comes from that.
Apology accepted. I see no ill-will to us in you.
After I had the op, I had a thought experiment. How would I feel if my right little toe was crushed in an accident, and had to be amputated? I hope I could come to terms with that, but it would be horrible. And yet I delighted in what I had had done.
Fascinating animation, elegant surgery. I saw they took good care of the glans penis, put it roughly in the clitoris’ position. I mean, although the procedure is not really something I’d advocate, and in real life probably much bloodier, it appears to save the nerve endings and allow the victim, sorry, patient, to still experience orgasm.
Although some may want this procedure, to impose it on unwilling gays is nothing short of criminal, a horrible atrocity indeed.
I also wonder if these forced ‘conversions’ in Iran are as sophisticated as the Tubingen surgery.
Ya, it is one thing if one doesn’t want a penis and my heart is sympathetic to all those who choose surgery to experience themselves more authentically. But for men who are gay and forced, even if they are still able to orgasm, they still lose the feeling of entering another man, which is tragic.
More so, something else that is causing me cognitive tension is the idea that reassignment surgery enables people who are chromosomally male to experience a chromosomally female orgasm. I don’t see this as possible. Not only this, but my experience of being a woman is run largely (not by my clitoris) but by my ovaries. And when I want sex often corresponds to the timing of my menses. My inner organs crave a penis before my period, and, in a primal, irrational manner, I can feel my body wanting to make babies. This has gotten stronger and stronger in my 30s. Reassignment surgery can’t give men the ability to bleed on a monthly basis and to feel their uterus ache to fill itself full and merged with the biology of its lover. Although we treat bleeding as a dirty and unwanted phenomenon to be hidden and despised, I’m certain that I will grieve during menopause and that I will miss the intensity of the longing that comes not from attraction or emotion but from within my own body’s organs.
“I also wonder if these forced ‘conversions’ in Iran are as sophisticated as the Tubingen surgery.”
My thoughts exactly! At worst it could be merely amputation.
Well, like many of the other males I had a hard time getting through the part about slicing open the scrotum and removing the testicles. I am typically wimpy when it comes to that stuff.
After that, I was fascinated. The final result was pretty accurate in terms of the point to point correspondence between the male and female bits and thingies down there.
I have a feeling it would be easier to change a penis into a vagina than the reverse. Creating the ability of an erection from the woman’s sexual anatomy seems a lot more difficult, but (like most people) I’m extremely naive when it comes to these procedures.
Unlike the vasectomy this business is not reversible.
Thank you for the post Professor- it is just the thought I had after the previous post- ‘how do they do that, anyway?’
Interesting to see how such complicated and seemingly impossible task is achieved. I am even more impressed by the ingenuity of the solution (but I know nothing of surgery).
“The suspension of judgment is the highest exercise in intellectual discipline.” –R. M. Gilmore
No, Ah ain’t noe expurt, an’ cain’t evun spel yerologist.
However, if my meager understanding of that wonderful organ, the vagina (perhaps to be preferred, on the basis of beauty and convenience alone, if not to calm yearnings to be what one is not—physically if not mentally) is at all correct, it would seem that there might be fertile (npi) ground for exploitation here, as if those with tendencies that deviate from their sexual plumbing haven’t been exploited enough.
I am a bit surprised, too, that there is little discussion or speculation, much less an hypothesis, much less a certitude, of the evolutionary value of the phenomena involved.
My own meager investigations of that wonderful and magical organ, while they may have been foreshortened (npi) by age, have not disappeared; nay, I dive into the subject at every opportunity, meager though they might be.
This leads me to wonder about how such a mutilation actually leads to even a reasonable facsimile of a vagina rather than the mere appearance of a cavity where there was once a protuberance. Perhaps others may be able to explain away my lack of knowledge, for example, concerning whether or not the inner tissues, especially of the G-spot, the H-spot, etc., have been created or transplanted. If so, what work has been done in the area of medical ethics in this regard?
If I understand correctly, the APA does not permit the scholarly investigation of the psychology of the phenomenon—nay, they say that such variations (presumably biological rather than environmental in nature) may not be studied by its members (npi).
With respect to the comment regarding “the yearning for a penis,” I was taught that it is the duty of the male to entertain females, especially those with those yearnings. I am well aware that this is at odds with the culture we live in, and am thus forced to force such females to take a cold shower, as it were, thus compounding the various adverse effects of horniness (to use the vulgar term to avoid convolution again [npi].) I pass no value-judgment here, but should point out that females are perhaps happier in Tahiti than in, say, Chicago. I would hope no less for those happily practicing their true proclivities with adults who have been fully informed in advance.