“You have to start thinking about surgery”

It was almost like a mantra with the doctor tasked with looking after our kid. He’d obviously never been trained in any alternatives. For him the only possible choice was surgery as soon as possible.

And oh what a surgery they had in mind. Because the plan they had was to essentially erase what’s there and only leave the bits that make my kid look normal (whatever the fuck that means.) It would have required what’s called a destructive surgery where they use surrounding tissue to construct the end result.

The destructive part is that you can never go back to the way it was. You can never get sliced nerve endings back. You can end up with dead spots where you have reduced or no feeling at all.

The more we looked into it the more horrified we became thinking of what they wanted to do to our kid. And they thought this would be helping him. That it would make him feel normal.

One surgeon even said that being able to pee standing up was vital for his psychological well-being. Imagine genuinely believing that the ability to pee standing up is the defining psychological attribute for masculinity.

We asked time and again if the surgery was medically indicated. Most of the time they avoided giving a direct answer. Some were honest and said no. So we held off. No one could give us a medical reason to go ahead with the surgery. It all boiled down to wanting to make my kid look normal.

Normal is a tricky thing. What’s normal to one person isn’t to another. But when we’re talking about genitals I think most people have a concept in their head that has been shaped by media, porn, and outdated sex ed.

You probably even have an image in your head right now of what “normal” genitalia looks like. I’m willing to bet that it includes everything you see when you look down at your own. And that’s where I’m going with this.

Because normal is what you know. What you see when you look at your own is what you’ve known all your life. It’s normal to you. So how could it be normal to make it look like someone else’s?

This also leads me into my next question, which question would you rather have when your kid grows up. “Why did you let them perform cosmetic surgery on me before I was two?” or “Why didn’t you let them perform cosmetic surgery on me before I was two?”

Because those are very different answers. One boils down to “we did what we thought was best” but there’s no going back. The other boils down to “We wanted you to be able to make an informed choice about your own body” and then you kid can choose if they want the surgery. We chose the latter.

Till next time…