Featured Image Credit: University of Tübingen
Topics: Health
Emma Guinness
Gender-affirming surgeries are becoming increasingly commonplace as modern medicine advances, and now people have been left 'fascinated' by a video showing male-to-female surgery.
The medical video depicts what is known as 'bottom surgery', which some transgender and non-binary people chose to have to align their birth sex with their gender. Watch below:
The video begins by showing a surgeon cutting open a scrotum and removing the testicles one by one, leaving the scrotum open.
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The head of the penis is then separated from the skin of the shaft, which the surgeon continues to cut away at to completely remove the head from the urethra and other connective tissues.
Although, we have to admit, it's a process that really does have to be seen to be believed.
It's at this point that the person's legs are lifted into the air to begin the procedure of inverting their penis into a vagina.
Without getting too technical, in a nutshell, the shaft creates the vaginal depth of the new sex organ, while the head of the penis is turned into a clitoris.
While there are obviously some things missing from a transgender vagina that you would not find in a person assigned female at birth, on the outside, at least, there is much of a muchness.
Transgender vaginas are not self-lubricating, for example, and trans women have to regularly dilate to stop their vaginas from closing up because they are created artificially.
There are two types of bottom surgery and what is depicted above is known as a vaginoplasty.
As you can imagine, after the video was posted to YouTube, viewers had a lot to say about the complex procedure.
"[This video] made me think about the first time it ever happened anywhere," wrote one viewer. "I don't have any idea how a person can just figure out how to re-route the male body and make it female - it's a miracle surgery at that.
"I am sure by today's standards they probably have a blue print for it, but when you think about the first time it was ever done, it took geniuses to figure that out."
"As a transgender woman I will eventually be having that done and I can't wait," added a second, while a third wrote: "Wow trans people are brave. That looks very scary. Congratulations to those who do this [sic]."
"Fascinating stuff," remarked another.
"This kind of stuff reveals how the differences between male and female anatomy are excessively overblown; it's all the same tissue. Just arranged differently."