I have been trying to detransition, but I can't return to the way I was. Three surgeries that promised to enhance my body have irrevocably damaged my physical integrity. Ten months ago I decided to undergo a procedure that the medical establishment claimed was safe, would reduce my anxiety, and would improve my physical health. It wasn’t transgender surgery, but I made the same mistake that people with gender dysphoria often make: dissatisfaction with my body and overconfidence in medical technology. I felt entitled to perfect eyesight, and so I had cataract surgery even though I had no cataracts. To be sure, cataract surgery and “trans” surgery are essentially different: one replaces a diseased organ with a functional technology, and one replaces a healthy organ with a non-functional technology. I am grateful to my surgeons for improving my eyesight in one aspect, but I lament the damage done to my eyes in other ways. My eye surgeries, however, opened my eyes to the fundamental errors we currently make regarding medical technology and the human person.
When my father’s eyesight began to diminish, he refused to wear glasses. My mother simply began using readers, even though they were not perfect. At 62, I decided to purchase progressive lenses, but while in the doctor’s office I saw ads for a surgery that promised clear vision without glasses. So with the money my Dad left me after his death, I paid a surgeon to cut off my natural, God-given lenses and implant artificial lenses.
For most people, I’ve been told, cataract surgery involves few or no complications. The human eye, however, is wondrously complex, and as one physician told me, “no technology will ever be as good as your God-given lens.” My doctor did not inform me about all the possible complications, nor how it could affect my life as a unique individual. For example, he did not explain how the surgery would almost certainly make a blue-eyed person more light-sensitive, nor did he ask if I spend a lot of time outdoors, which has now become quite painful for me. This disregard for the individual indicates how contemporary medicine tends to regard the human person not as a unique body-soul composite but as a physical machine needing simple part replacements.
The first surgery fixed my vision in one way but damaged it in five other ways. Seeking to repair these things, I got four other opinions from four other doctors, all of whom told me different things. In one of America’s premier medical facilities here in San Francisco, one physician gave his certain diagnosis, and ten minutes later a more senior physician gave me precisely the opposite diagnosis. I realized that doctors know some things about the marvelously complex human eye, but that they do not know much. In describing my complications, I was often met by a puzzled look and only that “I would hope it improves with time.” After my second surgery, with eight different complications, I still clung desperately to the hope that the medical establishment did know how to fix me, so I scheduled a third surgery. This procedure fixed one problem but created two more, damaging both my retina and my optic nerve.
Am I complaining? What I want to say is that modern medicine often promises what it cannot deliver. And if that is true of eye surgery, how tragically true it is of so-called transgender surgery. A person is hurting from some kind of sexual trauma and imbalance. The insurance and medical establishments rush in to promise that they can fix the problem, and we believe them. We spend tremendous amounts of money on risky surgeries under the illusion that technicians can “remake” us. But, actually, we should consider alterations to our bodily integrity only as a last resort. We should strive, rather, to be grateful for the bodies God has given us, and try to see meaning and purpose in our physical and mental limitations. We are, after all, not gods.
I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man TV show, where medical technicians “rebuild” an airman’s broken body. Most people under 40 don’t know who Colonel Steve Austin is, but they have been raised on the Six Million Dollar Myth: that with enough money, doctors can repair and rebuild anything. Which points to another problem: healthcare’s fantastic costs. The huge sums of money changing hands in all these surgeries would distort anybody’s professional opinion. If I pay a doctor $50,000 for a forty-minute surgery, he is less likely to discourage me from engaging his services than if I pay him $10,000.
One of my doctors, whom I now fully trust, is white-haired like me. I would guess he doesn’t need more money at this point in his life, and he tells the full truth about what surgeons can and cannot do. He told me not to get the third surgery, even though he is probably San Francisco’s best surgeon for that procedure. Nevertheless, I went to one of California’s most respected medical centers, got the 40-minute surgery, and received a bill for $60,000. It’s mostly covered by insurance (meaning I pay the entire amount over many years through insurance premiums). I’m sure the doctors don’t keep all that money, but they must keep a good bit of it, and with that kind of compensation, they might be less inclined to discourage patients from surgery.
My three eye surgeries cost me a load of cash, a year of anxiety and suffering, and (at this point) impaired vision. But consider how much more invasive are “transgender” surgeries, the complications to mind and body, and the lifelong hormone follow-up therapies. There is a lot more money to made in transgender “medicine” than in just about any other surgeries (some estimate around $2 million over one's lifetime). We mistakenly think we can control, manipulate, and reconstruct our own humanity, and we pay gobs of money to perpetuate this fantasy. As the voice-over technicians said on the Six Million Dollar Man show 50 years ago, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology….”
If we should approach the human eye with fear and trembling, how much more should we approach human sexuality? How much more delicate, wondrous, and mysterious is God’s gift of human love and the transmission of human life? Doctors, intellectuals, and politicians can tell us that sex is just recreation, and that the human person is just a meat machine, but there is far more evidence to the contrary. Our souls and our bodies are wondrous and unique gifts, much more a mystery to be discovered than a commodity to be manipulated.
I hope my body will recover its equilibrium some day. My most trusted doctor tells me that, with time and patience, I will recover to a large degree, both physically and psychologically. But even if I never regain full use of my eyes, I see more clearly that life is not a little lump of clay to be manipulated. Life is gift and mystery. Far better to respect this gift, and to thank God for this mystery in good times and in bad, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. With that humility before the miracle of human life, and that trust in the Creator, it seems to me, we best practice the medical arts.
When my father’s eyesight began to diminish, he refused to wear glasses. My mother simply began using readers, even though they were not perfect. At 62, I decided to purchase progressive lenses, but while in the doctor’s office I saw ads for a surgery that promised clear vision without glasses. So with the money my Dad left me after his death, I paid a surgeon to cut off my natural, God-given lenses and implant artificial lenses.
For most people, I’ve been told, cataract surgery involves few or no complications. The human eye, however, is wondrously complex, and as one physician told me, “no technology will ever be as good as your God-given lens.” My doctor did not inform me about all the possible complications, nor how it could affect my life as a unique individual. For example, he did not explain how the surgery would almost certainly make a blue-eyed person more light-sensitive, nor did he ask if I spend a lot of time outdoors, which has now become quite painful for me. This disregard for the individual indicates how contemporary medicine tends to regard the human person not as a unique body-soul composite but as a physical machine needing simple part replacements.
The first surgery fixed my vision in one way but damaged it in five other ways. Seeking to repair these things, I got four other opinions from four other doctors, all of whom told me different things. In one of America’s premier medical facilities here in San Francisco, one physician gave his certain diagnosis, and ten minutes later a more senior physician gave me precisely the opposite diagnosis. I realized that doctors know some things about the marvelously complex human eye, but that they do not know much. In describing my complications, I was often met by a puzzled look and only that “I would hope it improves with time.” After my second surgery, with eight different complications, I still clung desperately to the hope that the medical establishment did know how to fix me, so I scheduled a third surgery. This procedure fixed one problem but created two more, damaging both my retina and my optic nerve.
Am I complaining? What I want to say is that modern medicine often promises what it cannot deliver. And if that is true of eye surgery, how tragically true it is of so-called transgender surgery. A person is hurting from some kind of sexual trauma and imbalance. The insurance and medical establishments rush in to promise that they can fix the problem, and we believe them. We spend tremendous amounts of money on risky surgeries under the illusion that technicians can “remake” us. But, actually, we should consider alterations to our bodily integrity only as a last resort. We should strive, rather, to be grateful for the bodies God has given us, and try to see meaning and purpose in our physical and mental limitations. We are, after all, not gods.
I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man TV show, where medical technicians “rebuild” an airman’s broken body. Most people under 40 don’t know who Colonel Steve Austin is, but they have been raised on the Six Million Dollar Myth: that with enough money, doctors can repair and rebuild anything. Which points to another problem: healthcare’s fantastic costs. The huge sums of money changing hands in all these surgeries would distort anybody’s professional opinion. If I pay a doctor $50,000 for a forty-minute surgery, he is less likely to discourage me from engaging his services than if I pay him $10,000.
One of my doctors, whom I now fully trust, is white-haired like me. I would guess he doesn’t need more money at this point in his life, and he tells the full truth about what surgeons can and cannot do. He told me not to get the third surgery, even though he is probably San Francisco’s best surgeon for that procedure. Nevertheless, I went to one of California’s most respected medical centers, got the 40-minute surgery, and received a bill for $60,000. It’s mostly covered by insurance (meaning I pay the entire amount over many years through insurance premiums). I’m sure the doctors don’t keep all that money, but they must keep a good bit of it, and with that kind of compensation, they might be less inclined to discourage patients from surgery.
My three eye surgeries cost me a load of cash, a year of anxiety and suffering, and (at this point) impaired vision. But consider how much more invasive are “transgender” surgeries, the complications to mind and body, and the lifelong hormone follow-up therapies. There is a lot more money to made in transgender “medicine” than in just about any other surgeries (some estimate around $2 million over one's lifetime). We mistakenly think we can control, manipulate, and reconstruct our own humanity, and we pay gobs of money to perpetuate this fantasy. As the voice-over technicians said on the Six Million Dollar Man show 50 years ago, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology….”
If we should approach the human eye with fear and trembling, how much more should we approach human sexuality? How much more delicate, wondrous, and mysterious is God’s gift of human love and the transmission of human life? Doctors, intellectuals, and politicians can tell us that sex is just recreation, and that the human person is just a meat machine, but there is far more evidence to the contrary. Our souls and our bodies are wondrous and unique gifts, much more a mystery to be discovered than a commodity to be manipulated.
I hope my body will recover its equilibrium some day. My most trusted doctor tells me that, with time and patience, I will recover to a large degree, both physically and psychologically. But even if I never regain full use of my eyes, I see more clearly that life is not a little lump of clay to be manipulated. Life is gift and mystery. Far better to respect this gift, and to thank God for this mystery in good times and in bad, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. With that humility before the miracle of human life, and that trust in the Creator, it seems to me, we best practice the medical arts.
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