The Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) has proudly announced the expansion of their “gender-affirming services,” castration for the purpose of vaginoplasty, as well as creating non-functional “neo-penises” from the skin and flesh of forearms.
The Department of Surgery boasted of adding Dr. Blair Peters to its team, whose recruitment allowed for a “considerable expansion of OHSU’s gender affirming services.” This “notable expansion,” they said, adds “advances in the robotic vaginoplasty program” and to the phalloplasty program. Both surgeries come with extraordinarily high complication rates.
The Twitter account @RanchoAstro revealed how OHSU included the expansion of its gender surgeries in the Department of Surgery’s round-up of the 2022 accomplishments to be “incredibly proud of.”
Wishing each of you a safe and happy New Year. We have every reason to be incredibly proud of the work we’ve accomplished in 2022! Our most recent On The Cutting Edge highlights some of the accomplishments of our team. #WhyOHSUSurgery https://t.co/DBhi2QWLUT pic.twitter.com/Vt3aI9EEL7
— OHSU Department of Surgery (@OHSUsurgery) December 31, 2022
OHSU does not just offer sex change surgeries though. The gender clinic at the OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital provides so-called “gender-affirming” hormone therapy to children often as young as ten years old.
This comes in the form of experimental drugs to block puberty, which were once thought to be a harmless, fully reversible pause to give the gender-confused child time to figure things out, but have since been shown to make further medical transition almost a foregone conclusion with studies showing that almost every child who is put on blockers goes on to take cross-sex hormones.
While little is known about the long-term risks and complications of this experimental treatment pathway, the combination of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is thought to result in infertility, which is why pediatric gender clinics offer children fertility preservation services prior to commencing treatment.
The OHSU Doernbecher pediatric gender clinic teaches children how to pronounce the word “fertility” in its fertility preservation handout, seemingly without asking themselves whether a child who isn’t even able to read the word is really developmentally capable of consenting to being sterilized.
“Many trans and gender diverse people are interested in keeping, or preserving, their fertility (fur-TILL-uh-tee). This is the ability to have biological children,” the author of the handout writes.
Children are then given information about freezing their sperm or eggs, and boys are told that they can either provide a sperm sample or have sperm extracted directly from their testicles.
Should the child continue along the medical transition pathway, the next stage after cross-sex hormones is “gender-affirming” surgery, which can mean a hysterectomy, the removal of healthy breasts and the creation of a non-functional appendage from the skin and flesh of the forearm for female patients, and breast implants, castration and penis amputation for the male patients.
That’s where Peters, who notes the use of he/they pronouns and an Instagram account with the name QueerSurgeon, comes in. In a social media style reminiscent of Dr Sidhbh Gallagher, the celebrity gender surgeon who refers to amputating the healthy breasts of young women as Yeet the Teets, Peters likes to make jokes about the gruesome and often life-destroying surgery that is phalloplasty.
The business of stripping the forearm of female patients, turning it into a tube, and sewing it onto their groin is clearly booming for this gender surgeon, with Peters quipping in September last year that with so many surgeries booked, fall was being renamed “phall.”
So many phalloplasty cases on the schedule this fall.
I hereby refer to this season on my calendar as “phall”.
— Blair Peters, MD (he/they) (@queersurgeon) September 10, 2022
Peters also once jokingly referred to back to back phalloplasties as “a double header.”
Back to back phalloplasty cases next week.
A Double Header.
— Blair Peters, MD (he/they) (@queersurgeon) December 2, 2021
Peters also finds being invited to speak as a plastic surgeon at events related to psychiatry, child and adolescent medicine, and gynecology “very affirming.”
It has been very affirming to receive speaking invitations and visiting professorships from specialties all across medicine.
Recently: Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Medicine, Gynecology, Oncology.
I love what I do in Plastic Surgery. But this work transcends that.
— Blair Peters, MD (he/they) (@queersurgeon) January 6, 2022
Story cited here.
