A surgeon named Dr. Frankenstein has candidly revealed the downsides of performing genital re-shaping surgeries on transgender children and adults, in a video that has since been deleted.
In the video, Dr. Blair Peters, a self-described “strange surgeon” with “he/she” pronouns, pink hair and a “passion” for genital surgery, says patients face fertility, sexual pleasure and other lifelong postoperative complications.
Perhaps even 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 is “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’ genitals altogether, are widely regarded as difficult and problematic procedures.
Oregon’s pink-haired “queersurgeon” has tens of thousands of social media followers
Creating a neo-vagina is fraught with complications after surgery
Proponents of gender-affirming care, as it’s known, say they’re rare but essential for some transgender people. Critics say they should be banned, especially for children, and that patients need advice, not cutting.
Dr. Peters, a highly regarded 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 pulled from an archive and recently shared on social media. Viewers called the procedures “bad” and compared them to Nazi-era experiments.
Conservative scholar Christopher Rufo compared Dr. Peters to another clinician, the fictional experimenter who builds a monster out of body parts in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein.
OHSU, Dr. Peters and Dr. Durand did not respond to our requests for comment. OHSU’s gender clinic is well regarded among trans patients; waiting times for some procedures extend up to two years.
In the video, Dr. Peters details the progress made in phalloplasties and vaginoplasties, including using a robot controlled by a second surgeon to build a ‘neovagina’ from penile and scrotal tissue.
He also describes large-scale genital removals for non-binary patients, an increasingly popular procedure known as “annulment.”
Controversially, he addresses the “handful of adolescents with suppressed puberty” undergoing genital surgery at OHSU – referring to minors who have taken puberty blockers to slow their growth spurt.
Dr. Blair labels himself a “queersurgeon” in his social media accounts
A phalloplasty procedure, as described in a medical textbook
With those boy-to-girl transitions, he said, surgeons “don’t have enough tissue” to build up the neo-vagina and have to transplant skin from elsewhere.
“We’re kind of learning and figuring out what works,” Dr Peters said.
Patients often have problems after surgery, the doctor added.
They can suffer “rectal injury and urinary incompetence,” he said. Others struggle to achieve “sexual satisfaction” through altered body parts and have a higher chance of “future pregnancy.”
Some have a “really demanding postoperative care process,” he added.
Virtually every male-to-female recipient of genital surgery sees their neo-vaginal canal shorten over time, he said.
“We’ve seen patients come back even more than 20 years after a vaginoplasty and something has happened in their life, they just don’t turn off and they haven’t had sex for a year, and they’re going to lose a lot of depth,” said Dr. Peters.
Dr. Peters said his techniques and success rates improved as more Americans — both young and old — opted for genital surgery, but there was still a lot to learn on this new frontier of medicine.
“We’re going to learn a lot more about it over the next five to 10 years as we do more and more of these things,” he said.
Dr. Peters and other transmedicine proponents present the surgeries as a trade-off, acknowledging the substantial drawbacks but saying they are vital for people who experience severe discomfort with their own bodies.
What could go wrong? Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein prepares to resurrect his monster in a scene from the 1931 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
A study of more than 500 transgender adults by the Washington Post and KFF, a health-focused nonprofit, revealed that surgery was rare
Yet they are rare within the transgender community.
Of the estimated 1.6 million trans and nonbinary Americans ages 13 and older, only 31 percent take sex hormones and 16 percent opt for surgery, according to research from the Washington Post and KFF, a health charity.
Most surgeries are breast removals for female-to-male transitions.
Genital surgery in children is very rare and highly controversial. Even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which advocates for gender-affirming care worldwide, says procedures should not be attempted on children.
In the US this year, Republicans have sought to ban puberty blockers, hormones or surgery on minors in about 20 states this year. Sweden, Finland, the UK and other European countries have restricted or stopped trans care for children.
Dr. Peters and OHSU have drawn criticism in the past for their progressive approach.
Last year, Dr. Peters faced backlash over a since-deleted tweet in which he noted that he had performed breast removal surgery on three young adults and adolescents in one day.
Another OHSU clinician, Dr. Nicholas Gideonse, controversially became the first American professional to help terminally ill Americans travel from out of state to Oregon to get their hands on a deadly cocktail of drugs to end their lives.