Botched Surgery, Regret, & the Social Contagion
I lost my penis, my sex life, and my health to a surgery sold as liberation. Seven years later: one-inch depth, fistula, osteoporosis, no orgasm, lifetime of drugs. Cancel it—your body isn’t wrong.
Επισκόπηση
Shape, a 31-year-old detransitioner, recounts how a childhood of violent homophobia and social pressure led him to rapid medical transition—estrogen, facial feminization, breast implants, and penile-inversion vaginoplasty—by age 25. Years of botched revisions left him with one inch of depth, a rectal fistula, chronic pain, osteoporosis, and complete loss of sexual function. He now warns that transition was sold as a cure-all but became a life-long medical dependency and irreversible harm, urging young people to "cancel the surgery" and accept their bodies instead.
Πλήρης Περίληψη Βίντεο
Shape, a 31-year-old man originally from a Muslim-majority country in Eastern Europe, recounts a childhood marked by extreme gender non-conformity and violent homophobia. From the moment he secretly played with his sister’s dolls, his parents warned him “your dick will fall off,” and school bullies routinely threw him to the floor and called him misogynistic slurs. After coming out as gay at 14 or 15, his parents paid nearly a week’s salary to a therapist who simply told them “we can’t fix this.” Realizing he had no future in his home country, he learned English, left home at 16, and eventually landed in Massachusetts for graduate school. There, surrounded by non-binary and already-transitioned undergraduates, he was asked for the first time, “What are your pronouns?”—a question that set off a rapid cascade of online research, self-diagnosis, and medical transition. Within months he was on estrogen, had facial feminization, breast augmentation, and, at 24–25, underwent penile-inversion vaginoplasty. He describes the process as “a slippery slope”: each procedure was presented as the next logical step to cure his depression and dysphoria, yet every intervention deepened his despair. After the first surgery his neovagina began to close—“the body treats it as a wound and tries to heal it shut”—and repeated revisions left him with only one inch of depth, chronic pain, a rectal fistula, and no sexual sensation. He dilated obsessively, even driving with a stent inside him, but surgeons blamed him for “not dilating enough.” Meanwhile, no medical professional warned him that seven years without any sex hormone would give him osteoporosis and scoliosis, conditions discovered only after debilitating back pain and a bone scan in 2021. Shape emphasizes that his transition was driven less by an innate female identity than by social forces: the hope of escaping homophobia, the promise of a larger dating pool, and the intoxicating validation he received once he identified as a trans woman. He admits he “brainwashed” himself into hating his penis, internalized the trans community’s message that any man who liked his genitals was a fetishist, and believed that bottom surgery would finally make him a “real woman.” Instead, he lost his libido, his ability to orgasm, and his attraction to men briefly flipped toward women before returning when he restarted testosterone. Now, applying testosterone patches and injections, he experiences “phantom limb” dreams of having a penis again and feels like “a man trapped in a woman-lookalike body.” He still enjoys long hair and makeup, but says he could have expressed femininity as a gay man had anyone told him that was possible. Looking back, Shape wishes a clinician had sat him down and said, “You’re not a woman, and we don’t yet have the technology to make you one.” He calls the current system “a cruel medical and social experiment” in which surgeons, therapists, and activists have financial and ideological incentives to affirm transition while ignoring detransitioners. He notes that none of the professionals who wrote his surgery letters have followed up, that detrans patients are labeled “difficult,” and that regret statistics are dismissed as transphobic. His plea to young people is blunt: “Cancel the surgery. Enjoy your summer. You are not in the wrong body.” He wants future generations of feminine boys and masculine girls to be accepted without medicalization, and he frames his story as a warning that irreversible procedures, synthetic hormones, and a lifetime of dependence on Big Pharma are too high a price for what is ultimately “sex and clothes and hair and makeup.”