Trystan T. Cotten - Hung Jury: Testimonies of Genital Surgery by Transsexual Men

First published 2012

by Transgress Press

Oakland, CA 94608

2012 Transgress Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by electronic, mechanical, or any other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without expressed written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hung Jury: testimonies of genital surgery by transsexual men / edited by Trystan T. Cotten

Copyright 2012 Trystan Theosophus Cotten

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 0-6156-9235-4

ISBN-13: 9780615692357

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63001-269-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012948322

Transgress Press, Oakland, CA

Contents

This book would not have been possible without the contributions and support of many people. First and foremost, I want to thank and praise the contributors for their generosity and openness in sharing their stories so that others may benefit. It takes incredible courage and trust to share private and personal experiences of this kind. I also want to thank Zander Keig for championing this project and playing a vital role from its inception. His enthusiasm, written contributions, and input on book design and promotion were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition. Sandy Shuster deserves much thanks and praise for coming to our rescue in the 11 th hour and putting other projects on hold to proof the manuscript. She brought a compassionate perspective and insightful editorial advice. Special thanks also to Alexia Brooks for her editorial assistance. I also want to give warm thanks to Kristine Medea, Brice D. Smith, and Max Valerio for believing in and supporting the project throughout. I am grateful to my femme wife, Isabella Abrahams, for her personal testimony, love, wisdom, and continuing support. There are many others I want to thank, colleagues, friends, and family, whose names I cannot list here. Without their encouragement, love, and support, which sustained and reminded me of the reasons I began this project, this book might have never been completed

I have a confession to make. During my nearly 20 years of legal advocacy for transgender people, I have often been part of the problem this book is designed to address. Like too many other advocates and community members, I have portrayed genital surgeries for transgender men in overly negative terms. On many occasions, I have said that the quality of the surgery is poor, the appearance and functionality are inadequate, the cost is prohibitive, and the risk of complications is inordinately high. Little wonder, I would often conclude, that most transgender men do not obtain them. I now realize these statements paint only a partial and, in some respects, quite misleading picture.

In my defense, I made these disparaging statements mostly in the context of legal cases where I was desperately trying to defend the rights of transgender men who did not have genital surgery and were at risk of being declared legally female for that reason. In virtually every such case, these men were dragged into court through no choice of their own and forced to defend their legal gender in order to maintain relationships with their children. Often, whether a transgender man can be recognized as a childs legal father will depend on whether he is legally recognized as male. Under the pressure of these circumstances, it seemed important to explain to courts that the quality of FTM surgeries is so poor and the level of risk so high that it would be unreasonable to require a transgender man to undergo them to be recognized as legally male.

For example, in one case, my client was a transgender man fighting to have his marriage declared valid so that he could continue to be a legal parent to his two children, aged 6 and 9. He had transitioned at the age of twenty-one and lived as a man virtually his entire adult life. He had married a woman and raised two children, one adopted and one born through assisted reproduction. When he filed for divorce, his wife challenged the validity of the marriage in order to separate him from the children. My colleagues and I presented expert testimony from a surgeon who was extremely compassionate and dedicated to the wellbeing of transgender people, and who strongly believed that gender identity alone should determine a persons legal sex. To this day, I remain deeply grateful for his genuine respect and concern for transgender people, and his willingness to donate his time free of charge. In retrospect, however, I also realize that, in important respects, he had only a limitedand overly negativeperspective on phalloplasties for transgender men. He described them as, at besta tube of skin and meat hanging between their legs. He testified that a constructed phallus cannot function sexually like a penis, is incapable of erection, and has no sensitivity. He stated that he had never seen a phalloplasty that looked like a real penis and that its appearance may worsen over time, so that it becomes kind of flaccid and wrinkled up [like a] piece ofto me I think it looks like a dried up cucumber.

These statements are difficult to recount, and I do so with genuine remorse and regret for the pain they cause to me and other transgender men. Even if they are accurate in some limited sense about the outcomes of some particular surgical techniques and individual surgeries, they paint with far too broad a brush. They are needlessly harsh and disparaging. They discount the subjective experiences of transgender men. They play into damaging stereotypes of transgender people as freakish and tragic. And they arbitrarily adopt an idealized view of the appearance and functioning of non-transgender mens genitalia as the only measure of success.

I have also made overly negative statements about genital surgeries for transgender men in an effort to stop the enactment of laws or policies that provide access to an appropriate bathroom only to transgender people who have had genital surgery. Almost invariably, legislators and employers initially assume that genital surgery is the only objective test for whether a transgender person is entitled to be recognized in their new gender. Countering that misconception requires a massive educational effortabout the nature and variety of transgender identities, the realities of gender transition, and the absence of any medical basis for using genital surgery as the litmus test of a transgender persons authenticity or entitlement to recognition and respect. In these contexts, I have sometimes fallen back on arguments that genital surgeries for transgender men are inadequate and inordinately risky to help persuade decision makers not to base their restroom policies on genital surgery. In some cases, I have reluctantly used myself as an example, noting that while no employer would want my balding, bearded presence in a womens restroom, I have opted not to obtain genital surgery because I believed the results were inadequate.

My goal in these situations was nobleto secure rights for all transgender people regardless of their surgical status. It is a goal I still passionately support and continually work to achieve. But the means I have used in the pastdisparaging the quality and efficacy of genital surgeries for transgender menwere wrong, and I am determined not to rely on those misleading arguments any longer.

To be clear, when I made these arguments, I genuinely believed them to be true, based on the information available at the time. Like so many other transgender men, I had searched in vain for any detailed, accurate, and understandable information about the surgical options available for genital reconstruction. Over the years, as I matured in my own transition, I became increasingly eager to find that information and increasingly frustrated by how difficult it was to obtain. The sources of information I could find were extremely limited. I found a few websites devoted to sharing information about surgeries for transgender men, but to my disappointment, most of them focused on top surgery. Photos and descriptions of genital surgeries were few and far between, and the pictures tended to be taken immediately after surgery, when little healing had taken place. As a result, they were often hard to evaluate.