Doctors Pushed Me into Surgery
I woke up from vaginoplasty and knew it was catastrophic. Doctors called my regret OCD. Now I speak so others know: you’re not bad if you regret it, and you’re not alone.
Επισκόπηση
Richie Herron, a gay man with severe untreated OCD, recounts how medical professionals pushed him into vaginoplasty at 31, leaving him in chronic pain and without sexual sensation. After instantly regretting the surgery, he was gaslit by the gender clinic—his regret dismissed as mental illness—and discharged. Now detransitioned, he speaks out to warn others and offer support to those who feel trapped by regret.
Πλήρης Περίληψη Βίντεο
Richie Herron begins by recounting the moment he woke up from vaginoplasty and instantly knew “this has gone catastrophically wrong.” He describes the post-operative sight as looking “like an animal had bitten at the area,” the bruised, swollen flesh split open so badly that “it looked like I had three vaginas at one point.” The only sensation he now has is “deep pain,” and he has lost all capacity for orgasm. He says he repeatedly told the gender clinic “I regret this, I shouldn’t have done this,” only to be told “no, you don’t,” and to have his regret re-framed as a symptom of pre-existing OCD and a newly-diagnosed “unstable personality disorder.” After a year of being “gaslit,” he was discharged just as lockdown began, leaving him feeling “kicked to the curb.” Looking back, Richie says he never actually felt “like a woman inside.” Instead, he was a 27-year-old gay man with severe, untreated obsessive-compulsive disorder, crushing same-sex attraction he had tried to “pray away” with porn, and a chaotic life history that included parental divorce and social isolation. He characterises the five years of “gender therapy” he received as ideological coaching—“training” in queer theory that recast every discomfort as “cis-sexism” or “internalised transphobia.” When he expressed reluctance about surgery he was warned that if he did not want it he would be dropped from the clinic, a threat issued at a moment when he was also misusing substances and acutely vulnerable. The phrase “you’re an ideal candidate for gender reassignment surgery” was repeated so often, he says, that it began to feel like winning a competition. Richie believes the medical pathway was presented with almost no realistic discussion of risk. He lists complications he was never warned about—urethral stenosis that makes urination agonising, necrosis, permanent loss of erotic sensation—and notes that the consent sheet “doesn’t go into enough detail.” He also describes the surreal pre-op consultation: the surgeon barely spoke to him, the head nurse checked only that he had completed hair-removal, and the last time he ever saw his intact male anatomy was the night before surgery when he asked himself, “what the fuck am I doing?” He now regards the entire process as a form of “hoodwinking” that exploits people who, like him, are desperate for an escape from mental illness and isolation. Since going public two-and-a-half years ago, Richie has been attacked as a “grifter,” “fascist,” and “TERF,” and says detransitioners are held to impossible standards while transitioners are not required to acknowledge regret at all. He stresses that speaking out saved his life and gives him purpose: “I just want people to know that if you do regret it, you’re not a bad person.” He urges anyone considering surgery to “do yourself a favour and don’t do this,” arguing that the statistical evidence shows post-operative suicidality rises rather than falls. Today he lives as a man again, is in a relationship, and finds meaning in offering others the permission to be honest about their own regret.