Quite a while back I posted about the case of David Reimer who was reassigned as a female after a botched circumcision inadvertently removed most of his penis. Reimer eventually committed suicide at the age of 34. Recently, I found a reference online to a New England Journal of Medicine article dating back to 2004 which dealt with genital reassignment surgeries performed on patients suffering from Cloacal exstrophy which is a severe birth defect that occurs in approximately 1 in 400,000 live births. One of the most pronounced characteristics is severe phallic inadequacy, or the complete absence of a penis in genetic males. Historically, doctors have treated cloacal exstrophy by surgically altering, or "reassigning" these babies as female. John Gearhart, M.D., director of pediatric urology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center and an expert on exstrophy complexes, and colleagues challenged this standard treatment by studying 16 genetic males from 5 to 16 years of age, 1
Thoughts and ideas (plus a little gender theory) from an intellectually curious transgender person. - “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson