Pink News and its Surgical Fallacy
Pink News and its Surgical Fallacy
Our society likes to think it takes mental health seriously. So why is Pink News pushing young women with mental health issues towards a radical and dangerous form of surgery?
We are all concerned about mental health now, or are told we should be. Everyone who is anyone is on the mental health bandwagon, worrying about how fragile we all are. Or could become. Major employers. The great and the good.
We love to compare ourselves to the bad old days when mental health was scapegoated and the treatments were brutal and largely useless.
Dr. Walter Freeman, left, and Dr. James W. Watts study an X-ray before a lobotomy, 1941.
In the early to mid 20th Century these ranged from insulin injections that induced coma to various forms of neurosurgery. One of those, a faster and simpler version of prefrontal lobotomy, was developed by Walter Freeman using a conventional kitchen ice pick.
His infamous ‘transorbital lobotomy’ involved placing the pick behind the eye socket and hitting it with a hammer to drive it into the frontal lobes. The pick would then be moved vigorously for a few minutes to separate the lobes from the thalamus. Freeman argued this was such a simple procedure and required so little medical training it could be done in offices or homes without the assistance of a surgeon. 40 000 people were lobotomized in the US and 17000 in the UK. Thankfully, our attitude to mental health has evolved since then. Or has it?
Last week Pink News ran the latest in a long series of stories proclaiming the importance and liberating potential of so-called ‘bottom’ surgery for transmen (ie women).
There was a time, not long ago, before the smart phone collided with malign news organisations, like Pink News, that if a woman mutilated herself to look like she had some sort of fake penis we’d all assume she had some kind of serious mental health issue. Nowadays, we’re not allowed by the mainstream media or most social media sites to suggest even a hint of mental instabilility when discussing women who want their vaginas sewn up or chunks of rolled flesh sewn onto their bodies.
The trigger for Pink News’s umpteenth piece singing the praise of phalloplasty was a tweet a month ago from someone gender critical which posted actual photos of part of the procedure. This was described as bigoted and hateful, which is what the truth is apparently.
What neither Pink News nor the tweeter pointed out was that this was not the worst part of the procedure. I’m not going to post pictures of the gouged arm just after the skin is harvested. It’s gruesome stuff. The surgeons go down to the bone and open up the entire forearm. The pictures above are from months afterwards. Skin from the thigh or abdomen has been grafted on top of the wound in the arm, as is normal procedure.
Instead of mere factual details like that, Pink News quoted ‘happy’ customers at length, such as Felix,
“Felix, an artist, describing his graft as a sign of “euphoria and connection,” tells PinkNews he was nervous going into the surgery, "but the support he received helped him take the step that changed his life.”
Transitioning saved my life, sincerely, and it makes me so sad that so many people aren’t able to receive the care they need.”
A penis…as a sign of “euphoria and connection”? Not even men’s rights activists came up with that one. Other posts from Felix’s twitter timeline celebrate her growing a beard, courtesy of Testosterone injections. Testosterone (or T) just happens to be a powerfully mood-altering drug. Ask a body builder who’s taking it about that. If you’re lucky he’ll talk to you about …err…euphoria and connection. Or he might thump you.
So just how reliable are these wide-eyed approvals of surgery from girls who are effectively high as kites?