A surgeon dubbed Dr Frankenstein has candidly revealed the downsides of performing genital re-shaping surgeries on transgender children and adults, in a video which has since been deleted.
In the video, Dr Blair Peters, a self-described ‘queer surgeon’ with ‘he/they’ pronouns, pink hair and a ‘passion’ for genital surgeries, says patients face fertility, sexual pleasure and other lifelong post-op complications.
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.
