Meeting Shape Shifter: a Victim of Trans Medical Abuse

“Sometimes I can't comprehend that all this happened to me.”

The young, androgynous-looking person on Zoom has long, straight blond hair falling around a pale angular face with dark eyes, heavily made up with colorful eyeshadow. He calls himself Shape Shifter. Shape Shifter has gone from identifying as a gay man to a transwoman to where he is now: a place of regret and uncertainty, pain and anger at the lies told to him by trans activists and doctors. His healthcare providers told him that getting “sex reassignment surgery” would make him a woman, ending a lifetime of self-hatred as a feminine gay man. The procedure he underwent is called penile inversion surgery, also known as vaginoplasty. 

On Zoom, Shape is ready to unload his story. The medical trauma he went through is almost unimaginable. He has lost something many people take for granted. With an Eastern European accent, he is articulate and methodical about the way he tells me his story. His voice is calm and even amused at times, but the unmistakable sadness shows in his face nonetheless. 

Off the record he tells me his real name and I am able to verify facts he tells me about himself. I understand his need for some form of privacy even as he shows his face to tell his story. Online harassment by the trans cult destroys careers and livelihoods all too often. 

After the call, I sit there for a moment without moving. After several weeks of research on vaginoplasty, I was familiar with the grotesque and disturbing nature of the common complications and the surgery itself. But talking to Shape made it real, put a face to the medical horror story I was reading about. This article was going to be about the fact that this experimental surgery, which destroys the male sexual organ, is being done on boys too young to get a tattoo, all based on the lie that they can and should “become women.” The article about vaginoplasty on minors is still coming, but after talking to Shape, I knew his story needed attention of its own. 

Now in his early thirties, Shape was twenty-four when he underwent the procedure that changed his life forever. His surgeon told him that after the operation straight men would be interested in him sexually, and that it would be possible to have sex with these men “as a woman.” What he was not told was that his neovagina would close up, that he would lose all libido and sensation, and that he would undergo a litany of revision surgeries and live with painful and distressing complications, not to mention the crushing regret. 

Seeking a Sense of Belonging

“In this black and white world, I didn't see an option for me to exist on a spectrum.” 

Before his transition, Shape was looking to belong somewhere, he tells me during our interview. He endured a lifetime of bullying, moral condemnation, and harassment for being “too feminine.” After years of being told he wasn’t man enough, he internalized a great deal of shame. When he moved to the US at the age of twenty, he briefly felt a sense of liberation. He was finally able to be a feminine man without being shamed. Then the specter of transgender ideology found him.

When a grad school classmate asked him his pronouns, he began to research gender ideology. He describes the experience as “falling down the transgender ideology rabbit hole.” After seeing so many gushing testimonies from trans people claiming to love the medical changes made to their bodies, he started to convince himself he was really a woman trapped in a man’s body. Like others who have been taken in by the trans movement, he was a gender non-conforming person who thought he had found the panacea to his struggles. If he was really a straight woman trapped in a man’s body, then everything he had endured for being a feminine gay man kind of made sense. Being trans both explained everything he had been through and offered an escape. 

“I could finally be free of the homosexuality that I got shamed for my entire life.”

He found it easy to get prescribed hormones by telling doctors he felt like a girl on the inside. Breast and face surgery were next. Experiencing no complications, he continued with his transition. The next and final step was “bottom surgery.” What he didn’t know at the time was that taking this step would not bring him closure. In fact, the procedure was going to destroy his life and fill the rest of his twenties with painful medical complications and revision surgeries. 

Shape’s therapists and surgeons pushed him through for the procedure, despite his struggles with depression and prescription pill addiction. “This was my first time going to mental health professionals,” he tells me. He feels the experts should have questioned how past traumatic experiences, homophobia, and ongoing depression played into his desire to alter his genitals forever. Instead of digging into the issue of his inner pain and desire for acceptance, Shape’s therapist told him he was really a woman and recommended him for sex reassignment surgery. “I feel so angry,” he tells me. After only a few months worth of visits, he procured letters from this woman and one other therapist recommending him for penile inversion. Did they know you were struggling with pill addiction, I ask him. Yes, he says, telling me he was asking his therapist for early refills for his prescriptions. 

“Nobody tried to sit me down and be like really is that what you want, maybe you'll grow out of it.”

After the surgery, he tells me, his therapist did not reach out to see how he was doing. Now he can’t even get hold of her. Likewise, none of his surgeons have followed up to check on him, he says. 

"Surgeons tell you you are a woman, they give you a letter that says you are a woman. Then you go out into the world and people still don't see you as a woman." 

The operation, which Shape describes as a sexual lobotomy, is an experimental procedure lasting seven to ten hours. The surgeon dissects and inverts the penis, creating a tunnel that they call a neovagina. Medical sources online also refer to the man-made hole simply as a vagina, which is dishonest and deceptive. 

During the procedure, the surgeon opens up the penis and testicles, removes much of what is there, slices and repositions the little that is left, and pushes the tattered pieces that remain into a man-made cavity. You can watch a medical, computer generated version of the procedure in about five minutes, but it is not for the faint of heart. 

It wasn’t long after the initial surgery that Shape’s neovagina closed up. It was acting like a wound, he says, and trying to heal itself. Only a few months after the penile inversion surgery, he was back on the operating table for his first revision. His surgeon blamed him for not dilating enough (dilating is the act of inserting a medical instrument into the new canal every day so it doesn’t close up). The idea is that the hole works kind of like an ear piercing: at first you need to keep an earring in there or else it will close up, and it eventually heals, leaving a permanent, clean hole in the flesh. The neovagina does not work like this in practice. Shape tells me that despite his consistent, almost around the clock dilating–which is extremely painful–his neovagina still closed almost all the way up. 

The first revision–an attempt to reopen the neovagina–did not work. The canal once again closed up. Shape went to another surgeon for his next revision. This time, the surgeon grafted a piece of colon tissue onto the neovagina. This method is not preferred by most surgeons as it makes the neovagina susceptible to diseases of the colon, and can cause side effects such as making the new hole smell of feces, as well as bacterial overgrowth, which can cause greenish discharge. With colon tissue lining the neovagina, there will be constant secretions–these are digestive fluids that leak out of the hole. 

Within just a month, the passage again began to close. 

Shape still had hope that he would be able to fix this surgical disaster and escape with a set of functioning genitals. He had originally undergone this surgery based on the promise that it would finalize his transition into a woman. Medical professionals he trusted had told him that he’d be able to have sex with his new “vagina.” Indeed, one of the talking points of the trans movement is that “being gay is who you go to bed with, and being trans is who you go to bed as.” But the procedure that activists tout as lifesaving healthcare destroyed Shape’s ability to “go to bed” at all. 

During his next revision, surgeons shaved down his pelvic bone in an attempt to make the entrance to the hole wider. It was after this procedure that he developed a fistula. What this means is that his neovagina wound essentially opened into his rectum. This complication can cause the neovagina to expel feces and flatulence. 

Another revision surgery was scheduled to fix the fistula. Once awake from the procedure, surgeons told Shape that they had found his fistula had healed on its own. But when they noticed his neovagina had started to close again, they dilated it while he was under anesthesia. He believes it was this act that actually reopened the fistula, which he discovered after getting home from the procedure. 

It was clear at this point to Shape that the surgeons didn’t know what they were doing. He is not interested in more revision attempts, telling me he fears he could end up with a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. 

As if all that is not enough, Shape also suffers from osteoporosis and scoliosis from the hormones he was given as the first step in his transition.

“You sacrifice a body part to be a woman and then realize people don’t see you as a woman no matter what you do.”

At its worst, this surgery creates a permanently oozing wound with phantom limb symptoms (Shape has experienced these), constant risk of infections, fistulas, and stenosis (the closing up Shape describes), and zero sexual feeling or function. At best (let’s say there are no complications) it still castrates the patient and banishes him forever to an in-between state with neither male nor female parts. 

Shape wishes someone had told him about the data that shows suicide rates go up after the surgery. A 2011 study from Sweden looked at a group of 191 male to female transitioners and found that mortality, including from suicide, increased after sex reassignment compared to the general population. Suicide attempts were also higher in the post-op population. Trans activists who call vaginoplasty and other trans procedures “life-saving healthcare” ignore this data, to the detriment of the individuals they claim to want to protect. 

It is difficult to find precise numbers for how many American men are getting this surgery, because there is a dearth of data right now, but somewhere in the region of one to two thousand men are getting penile inversion surgery each year in the US. I asked Shape if he knows anyone who had good results from the surgery. No, he tells me. He does not believe anyone gets good results. Men lie not only about penis size, but also about inverted penis size, he says wryly–meaning that in his view, anyone who claims to be having penetrative sex with their neovagina is lying to cope with the fact that the canal tends to close up.

“I was trusting people who had MD next to their name. I trusted people who had white robes on,” Shape tells me.

With more and more surgeons entering the scene with dollar signs in their eyes, some in the field worry that a lack of training will cause serious issues for vaginoplasty patients. “I have seen horrific unethical practices by surgeons who lie about their experience and horrific results surgically as a result of that,” said one anonymous vaginoplasty surgeon in a 2017 study. “We are using transgender people as guinea pigs and the medical profession allows this to happen,” the surgeon went on, “the biggest reason for why everyone is doing it now, is the money is flowing. Because now insurance is paying.”

Shape was a vulnerable young man who was used as a guinea pig. The doctors, surgeons, and therapists responsible should be held to account. Unfortunately, Shape is on his own, trying to find peace and healing after being the victim of medical experimentation.

How much longer will the trans movement push the lie that these experimental procedures are life saving healthcare–even and especially for children? How many more young, healthy bodies will be tampered with, how many more lives destroyed before the industry buckles under the weight of its misdeeds? In the meantime, Shape uses his story to try to warn others. Let’s help him by amplifying his words and spreading them far and wide. 

With thanks to Shape Shifter for his candor and bravery in speaking out. You can find him on twitter @ShifterofShapes.