A gender surgeon dubbed Dr Frankenstein has revealed the downsides of performing genital re-shaping surgeries on transgender children and adults, in a video which has since been deleted.
Dr Blair Peters is an assistant professor of surgery in the division of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Oregon Health and Science University
In the video, Peters, a self-described ‘queer surgeon’ with ‘he/they’ pronouns, pink hair and a ‘passion’ for genital surgeries, admits that patients face lifetime post-operative difficulties related to fertility, sexual satisfaction, and other issues.
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The Mail Online rports: Perhaps more concerning is how Dr Peters — who works at one of America’s most progressive hospitals — presents his procedures, some of which involve robotics, as experimental.
He says he’s ‘figuring out what works’ and that his team will know more in the next ‘five-to-10 years.’
Surgically altering male and female genitals to match those of the opposite sex, or simply removing patients’ privates altogether, are widely understood to be tough and problematic procedures.
Advocates of gender-affirming care, as it is known, say they’re rare but vital for some trans people. Critics say they should be banned, especially for kids, and that patients need counselling, not cutting.
Dr Peters, a highly-rated plastic surgeon at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), made the admissions in a 37-minute interview with Dr Brianna Durand, of Empower Physiotherapy in Seattle.
The original video post from last year appears to have been deleted, but then retrieved from an archive and shared recently on social media. Viewers called the procedures ‘evil’ and compared them to Nazi-era experiments.
The conservative scholar Christopher Rufo likened Dr Peters to another clinician, the fictional experimenter who builds a monster from body parts in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein.
OHSU, Dr Peters, and Dr Durand did not answer our requests for comment. OHSU’s gender clinic is well regarded among trans patients; wait times for some procedures stretch to as long as two years.
In the video, Dr Peters describes advances being made in phalloplasties and vaginoplasties, including by using a robot controlled by a second surgeon to build a ‘neo-vagina’ from penis and scrotum tissue.
He also describes wholesale genital removals for non-binary patients, an increasingly popular procedure known as ‘nullification.’
Controversially, he addresses the ‘handful of puberty-suppressed adolescents’ undergoing genital surgeries at OHSU — referring to minors who have taken puberty blockers to delay their growth spurt.
With those boy-to-girl transitioners, he said, surgeons ‘don’t have enough tissue’ to build the neo-vagina and must graft skin from elsewhere.
‘We’re kind of learning and figuring out what works,’ said Dr Peters.
Patients frequently have problems after surgery, added the doctor.
They can suffer ‘rectal injury and urinary incompetence,’ he said. Others struggle to achieve ‘sexual satisfaction’ from altered body parts and have worse chances of ‘future childbearing.’
Some have a ‘really demanding post-operative care process,’ he added.
Pretty much every male-to-female genital surgery recipient sees their neo-vagina canal shorten over time, he said.
‘We’ve seen patients coming back even 20-plus years out from a vaginoplasty that have something happened in their life, that they just don’t dilate, and aren’t having sex for a year, and they will lose a lot of a lot of depth,’ said Dr Peters.
Dr Peters said his techniques and success rates were improving as ever more Americans — both young and old — opted for genital surgery, but that there was still much to learn on this new frontier of medicine.
‘We’re going to learn a lot more about it in the next five to 10 years as we’re doing just increasing numbers of these cases,’ he said.
