A leading gender reassignment surgeon says he is preparing to embark on a radical new procedure – swapping the genitals of a male and female patient in a single operation, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Dr. Miroslav Djordjevic, who works at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and in his native Serbia, says he has been honing his technique for 15 years and is on the cusp of a revolutionary genital exchange procedure.
Yet it remains unclear which trans patients will go under the knife, or where the surgery will take place – as experts warn of ‘huge risks’ in a procedure that could go horribly wrong.
“Now we are in a final step,” Dr. Djordjevic said in the latest episode of Doctor podcasts.
Dr. Miroslav Djordjevic says the exchange of genitals between men and women is the “goal of my career.”
‘The final approach will be to transplant the penis. This is my main goal, the goal of my career. And I hope this future started yesterday.”
Transgender surgeries, especially those on children and young people, are hugely controversial.
Proponents say they help transgender people live as their “authentic selves,” but critics say the procedures are risky and experimental, lead to recurring problems and that many people live to regret them.
Surgeons already perform genital reconstruction surgeries known as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties.
They involve creating a neo-penis or neo-vagina from flesh on the patient’s arms, legs or elsewhere.
For Dr. Djordjevic, however, they are wasteful because a patient’s removed sexual organ is simply “thrown in the trash.”
“I came to the conclusion that it could be useful to use these very healthy organs,” he said.
That’s why he honed the technique of swapping the genitals of biological male and biological female patients in the same procedure, he says.
“This is now my main research,” he said, into the work he does at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.
“It was my vision and my dream 10-15 years ago.”
Most of his patients are ideal candidates because they are typically young, healthy and in their early 20s, he added.
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Podcast host Dr Robert Cykiert says the ground-breaking surgery carries ‘very significant risks’.
It is not yet clear whether Dr. Djordjevic will try the experimental procedure at the Mount Sinai Hospital Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery
In recent years, he said he has successfully transplanted a uterus, ovaries and testicles into his patients.
‘We have had a delivery from all three of these transplants. That’s a very good result,” he said.
He spoke about the procedure in the podcast together with other experts in trans medicine.
They were Dr. John Steever of Mount Sinai, an expert in giving puberty blockers to trans youth, and Marci Bowers, the trans male-to-female gynecologist who heads the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Podcast host Dr Robert Cykiert told DailyMail.com that the genital swap would represent a ‘major breakthrough’ in trans medicine.
“Until now, people who underwent this surgery altered their genitals and reproductive organs using skin and muscle tissue grafts taken from their forearms and other body parts,” said Dr.
Cykiert.
But, he added, the new procedure poses “very significant risks to the patients who trade their genitals.”
‘Like kidney, heart, liver and face transplants, patients who undergo intersex genital transplants are at an extremely high risk of rejecting their new sex organs,’ says Dr Cykiert.
The revelations were made in the latest episode of Doctor Podcasts, hosted by Dr. Robert Cykiert
To prevent this, they would have to take “long-term immunosuppressive medications,” he added.
“These drugs put patients at high risk of developing serious infections, several types of cancer and other serious, chronic medical problems,” he said.
Mount Sinai and the University of Belgrade did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
But Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery says on its website that Dr. Djordjevic and his colleagues are experts in their field.
“The physicians have experience with more than 2,000 genital transgender surgeries, demonstrating their care for each new patient,” Mount Sinai’s website says.
Dr. Djordjevic is not the first gender reassignment surgeon to come under scrutiny for his groundbreaking work.
Earlier this year, Dr. Blair Peters of Oregon Health and Science University candidly revealed in a video the downsides of the genital reconstructive surgeries he regularly performed on trans children and adults.
Dr. Peters, a self-described “queer surgeon” with “he/she” pronouns, pink hair and a “passion” for genital surgeries, said patients faced fertility, sexual pleasure and other lifelong postoperative complications.
Trans surgeries have a worryingly poor success rate
Critics compared him to the fictional monster builder, Dr. Frankenstein, and he was criticized at a Congressional hearing.
Meanwhile, experts are increasingly questioning transgender medicine.
One of the first studies into the side effects of trans surgery this year revealed alarmingly high rates of postoperative pain, pain during intercourse and bladder problems, raising troubling questions for this new frontier of medicine.
A large majority – 81 percent – of those who have undergone gender confirmation surgery in the past five years say they suffered pain from simply moving in the weeks and months after going under the knife.
Researchers from the University of Florida and Brooks Rehabilitation, a nonprofit health care organization, have shown that more than half of trans-surgical patients experience pain during sex, and nearly a third have no control over their bladder.