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Children's first Massachusetts hospital to create a penis for a transgender patient

WBUR reports on Children's Hospital's new transgender surgery center - which only takes patients over 18 - and interviews its first surgical patient.


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Comments

What physical aliment are they suffering from which could have negative impacts on their overall physical health?

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The implication of your question is that there must be a physical ailment (not aliment) that has negative impacts on their overall physical health. Therapy with emotional challenges does not automatically tie to physical health (at least not immediately). Would you ask the same question then about therapy for help with emotional challenges?

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The suicide rate for transgender folks who don't have their gender affirmed is through the roof (note: for some people, surgery isn't necessary to feel basically OK with themselves, but some folks do have extreme body dysphoria and literally want to kill themselves every time they are reminded they have the wrong genitalia.)

Being dead is certainly a physical ailment, so we want to prevent that.

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How innovative. Just want America needs. I can only hope our tax dollars pay for such beneficial opperarions at our finest medical facilities.

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Yes, how observant. I'm glad you commented because that is exactly what is happening here. Thanks for being a contributing member of our great society. Emphasis on "member".

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A troll ranking system?

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It's a valid point that a few years ago the state government declared transgender surgery to be "medically necessary" instead of "elective". It wasn't a unanimous decision and reasonable people can disagree about the merits of that.

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Reasonable people with the medical qualifications to understand the full spectrum of issues, including privacy, insurance, and psychological impacts.

In other words, reasonable people with a dog in the hunt.

Otherwise, reasonable people can agree or disagree about whether you should be allowed to drive a car or get a prescription for blood pressure medication when you "could just lose weight" or use "viatamin cures", etc. See?

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.

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Male veterans?

Willing civilians who volunteer for these procedures make it possible for surgeons to acquire the skills to help those who suffer traumatic emasculation due to things like IEDs.

Not to mention cancer patients.

Your desk never did that to you, nor did your keyboard, so you clearly don't care.

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The irony is that your response actually proves your point:

Evidently, we have enough dicks around and don't need them creating any more.

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HIGH-YO!!!!

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There are any number of surgical skills that can be developed here:
1. improved microvascular surgery techniques
2. reconstruction techniques
3. perfusion techniques
To name a few.

The bottom line: learning to do this for an elective surgery patient will help surgeons help boys/men born with incompletely formed genitalia. It will help surgeons with reconstruction and reformation of penises for men who have suffered traumatic mutilations (think IEDs ...). It will also help men who have lost organs to disease processes, like cancer.

It isn't just about sexuality or gender, either: men with these conditions end up in diapers or other external urine collection devices. If reassigning a consenting adult contributes to the ability of surgeons to help men with no other options, then it is a valuable thing, indeed.

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Not that I know anything beyond a little internet reading, but it seems to me that constructing any kind of viable penis is quite an undertaking, especially if the original body is not male. So many things have to be implanted or addressed for it to be anything but an expensive decoration.

I have no idea about the tax dollar angle, but Swirl's dead right. Just to enhance the knowledge base sounds worth it.

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"elective surgery patient"

Which contradicts the commenter's complaint about how this operation was being paid for by insurance (i.e. everyone else) because it's supposedly MEDICALLY NECESSARY not ELECTIVE.

If people want to get elective surgery on their own dime, great. But don't make everyone else pay for it.

And if Children's Mercy wants to help soldiers injured by IEDs, then they could just directly provide care to soldiers injured by IEDs. Don't pretend that they're providing a charitable service to vets by "practicing" on random people. They set up a trans surgery center because there's serious money in it, because of how the state requires the public to fund it.

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That this isn't about hate. Your hate of people different from you. Your obsession with people's body parts and whether they fit your requirements for them.

It may not be "medically necessary" to give you a new dick if the old one is blown off, either. Or to correct a "cosmetic" birth defect even if it means diapers.

Do not pretend that you are all about "medical necessity" - because you're idea of necessary for you will be next.

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You obtuse fool, that isn't what elective surgery means. Elective surgery is scheduled surgery. Emergency surgery is unscheduled. This distinction has nothing to do with medical necessity.

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So what would you call surgery that isn't medically necessary?

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it's called "cosmetic."

There are times though that types of surgeries that are often cosmetic will be considered medically necessary, like a congenital facial difference that is causing staring and teasing, or something that's caused by an accident and results in significant disfigurement. So a particular surgery might sometimes be cosmetic and sometimes be medically necessary, depending whether it's "I don't like my nose" or "my nose is so different from typical that it's all anyone notices about me."

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And it's cool that it brings benefits in these other areas too, but like...it would also still be totally worthwhile if it only benefited trans men! Trans people deserve to be happy and healthy too!

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It isn't like women will be standing in line for this even if it would increase their pay.

Kind of like how people got totally worked up over Octomom, who was an absolutely singular case, but not over the cost of young teens having babies because they couldn't access birth control. Or get upset over some 800lb person on disability, but not about the structural issues that lead to the obesity epidemic or the cost of insulin.

These hoofbeats are zebras, not horses. Us public health types are trained to listen for the horses.

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Believe it not, not everyone who disagrees with you on certain issues is full of paradoxical logic (like denying birth control and blocking abortions and blocking early intervention services all at the same time). You're attacking strawmen, again.

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Strawmen don't have hooves.

Go back to swearing at zebras - I'm off to tend the horses.

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can't trolls ever spell?

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Because they're stupid.

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This news article has been up for over 4 hours an nobody even mentioned the name of this procedure!

...
It's called an Addadictomy!

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IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/vtNoN0v.gif)

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I meant to do a facepalm one. But, hey.

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No, this one's better.

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Perfect!

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