Doctors can now transplant penises. What does this mean for transgender men?
After three years without a functioning penis, Thomas Manning has one again—only it’s not his. A serious work accident in 2012 lead doctors to discover he had a rare, aggressive, and potentially fatal penile cancer, and in order to save the 64-year-old’s life, they were forced to remove most of Manning’s penis. After a lengthy surgery performed by staff volunteering their time at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Manning just became the first American to receive what appears to be a successful penis transplant.
Prior to May 8th of this year, if you lived in this country and had your penis removed (accidentally or on purpose), your options were slim—the chances you’d be able to urinate standing up again or reproduce through sex seemed like a pipe dream. But the new experimental transplant procedure performed on Manning could change everything. And while the initial focus of the surgery has been on cancer patients and military veterans who have lost a penis due to traumatic injuries and are not able to have theirs repaired or reconstructed, the longterm impact could be felt by an entirely different population: transgender men.
For many men, feeling like a “real” man is inextricably linked with having a phallus. Most of the military vets who have suffered from what doctors call “genitourinary injuries”—1,367 in Iraq or Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013, according to the Department of Defense—are under 35 years old and report feeling completely stripped of their manhood. But for transgender men who were not born with a penis, having one could be the final step in their transformation into what it means to be physically male.
“As a trans guy, I’m thrilled to see the incredible strides being taken in the medical community,” Kade Clark, one of the founders of online transgender health resource My Trans Health, told me via email on Monday. “These transplant programs are of vital importance.”
But according to Dr. Dicken Ko, one of the team leaders in Manning’s transplant, he and his colleagues will not be offering a similar procedure to transgender men just yet. So what’s stopping them?
Well, a lot of things.
