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First Surgery: "Sorry, We Cut Your Bladder; Here's A Tylenol!"
How Big Gender gaslit me, broke me, nearly killed me … and why I'll never be silent again
by, Scott Newgent
My eyes felt heavy, but the bright white walls of the surgery clinic kept me alert as the IV drugs started to take the edge off.
"You'll be fine," my fiancé said, but something inside me told me differently. Something inside me screamed at me to leap off the gurney as the nurse began to unlock my hospital bed to wheel me into the operating room. Lynette could see I was anxious and squeezed my hand harder. The gesture comforted me, but deep down, I felt troubled that she was so eager to see me wheeled into the surgery room. I wished I had more time to talk to her, but instead it was all a whirlwind. I wanted to tell Lynette my fears, but instead, I smiled at her, hoping any moment she would say, "Baby, I know you are doing this for me, and you don't have to, because I will love you anyway, just the way you are." Minutes seemed like hours as the terror grew inside me, until all at once it hit me and I tried to lift my body to protest and say, "Stop, this is wrong!" But it as too late. Neither Lynette nor I said anything. By the time I came to my senses, the drugs had taken over.
The last thing I felt was the piercing cold of the metal operating table as the anesthesiologist said, "Count down from 100, sir." I attempted to muster enough strength to say, "Wait, I'm not a sir, this is wrong." But all I emitted was the inaudible flicker of my eyelids fighting to stay awake, while my mind raced. I wanted them to stop, then it all faded to black.
It had only been two-and-a-half months since I started taking testosterone shots, but a transformation had already begun taking place. My usual self-assurance was slipping from me; it started almost instantly. My personality always admitted confidence, an air of arrogance touched by sincerity, and that confidence was sinking. I wondered why. The combination was unique and one of the critical components that made me an ultra-successful business sales executive. My confidence and cocky air made people look up when I spoke at a sales presentation; I commanded attention. It was my sincerity that made me different. This combination of sincere brashness is extremely rare, something very few sales professionals have. It's usually one or the other.
I had earned the right to be cocky; I knew where I came from and what I overcame despite it. I allowed myself to fail in life without turning it inward; I treated every failure - and let's face it, I had a lot - as a learning opportunity, studying each misstep and tucking away each lesson as I moved forward. I never made excuses. I took the sting of blame and was a better salesperson for it. It was never someone else's fault; it was mine, and I made sure I did not make the same mistake again. The other half was honest and from the heart; I never faked sincerity. I felt it and wanted to do the right thing for people, customers, and businesses. I took the lessons from people in my life who used and exploited me, always remembering what that felt like and never wanting to do the same.
My decline in confidence started almost immediately after my first injection of T, and it took several months to realize that I had stepped back in conversations. In sales meetings, I stopped raising my hand, inquiring about strategies, fighting for accounts; I wanted to get in and out without too much noise. What? That was not who I was, and it confused me.
As I started to come to after my first surgery, I felt a pain I had never experienced; it was as if something had opened up my insides and rearranged them and given me a simple Tylenol for my trouble. I started to scream. Nurses came running, "I gave him enough morphine to kill an elephant; I cannot give him anymore." I heard the doctor and nurses speaking to my fiancé and they were contemplating taking me from the clinic to the hospital. When they'd opened me up in the operating room, they'd found a massive hernia attached to my bladder that made the hysterectomy and top surgery impossible to perform. On the spot, they decided my hernia needed removal first and to delay all other procedures until later. During the removal process, the surgeon nicked my bladder with his scalpel, cutting it open. I was never informed in detail what that meant, just told it was fixed and not to worry. I have researched since then and discovered I most likely had an inguinal hernia. An inguinal hernia is exceptionally rare and only occurs in 1-6% of all hernia removals. It is recommended that a specialist perform this surgery due its severity and possible complications. Since that surgery, I have battled with incontinence, and I am currently in need of another surgery to correct it, my eighth.
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Interestingly, my plastic surgeon had hired a gynecologist to conduct my hysterectomy during my top surgery. I heard rumors that the gynecologist wanted to send me to the hospital due to the size and severity of the inguinal hernia discovered. However, to keep his referral rate from his clinic to the hospital low for insurance purposes, he kept me at the clinic to conduct the removal. Unfortunately, I have no confirmation of this rumor, but if true this is a big problem within transgender medicine that needs addressing.
Currently, to dive into the lucrative business of transgender surgery, surgeons only need to have basic surgeons credentials, no specialized training. The 'top' transgender surgeries (mastectomies) are the least invasive. In contrast, bottom surgeries, including the phalloplasty, or building of a penis, are some of the most challenging operations to perform, ranked as high or higher than open-heart surgery or brain surgery. The level of skill needed to connect and rearrange urethras and veins, for instance, - requires the most skilled surgeons the medical industry has to offer. Yet currently, the surgeons who enter this field of transgender surgery need no specialized training. Surgeons can make a trip to the local 'OfficeMax' and have a sign made saying, "Transgender Surgeon," hang it on the door and poof! the transgender craze will supply them with a line of patients wrapping around their building begging for surgery. Instantly, they have insurance companies approving $50,000 procedures with profit margins mirroring brain surgery - no questions asked. These surgeons have the LGBTQ Force Shield to protect them and an army of activists to rationalize any lousy publicity as transphobia. These unqualified surgeons hide behind LGBTQ ideology to dodge medical malpractice cases because transgender surgery is considered experimental; without a set baseline to compare results, lawsuits are almost impossible.
Top-rated surgeons in the world refuse to conduct transgender bottom surgeries, and not because of bigotry. They know the complications, and it's an elective surgery with a 67% complication rate. These are not life-saving surgeries, and due to this, brilliant surgeons stick to heart and brain surgery. Surgeons conducting appendectomies and other simple general surgeries can go from making $300,000 a year to millions almost instantly. My bladder was the least invasive complication, but others that followed do not just cause me just discomfort. These complications have re-written the date on my tombstone to a much earlier date of death than before I decided to transition medically. I have shortened my life with this decision, and I think about my future grandkids everyday, knowing I might not ever meet them. My choices, well, what can I say? I ache for them and in my head I’m constantly saying, “I’m sorry my babies and my future grandbabies, I’m so so sorry.”
As I woke up from the anesthesia, I heard the whispers, "Scott, no no, it's ok, we could not conduct the top surgery, yes yes you still have your breasts, we had complications, but you are ok." I should have taken note that I needed no consoling about my breasts still being a part of me. A sign, perhaps?
The reality was that even though I had dreamed, wanted, and understood how much easier my life would have been like if I’d been born male, I was not, and so throughout my life I dug deep to develop a fondness for who I was. I fought for everything emotional, and it took a long time to begin the process of accepting myself. I knew the context of my personality and sexuality would have made me the "ultra" boy my father wanted, the “King” in our family who would have had it all. I would have been the alpha male paraded and placed upon a pedestal decorated with footballs, motorcycles, money, attention, dirt, and everything else I loved. Hell, I would have never needed to walk onto a pedestal - I would have been born on one. Instead, who I was became accepted, not celebrated, and I was painfully aware of that. But I worked hard over the years and was finally starting to embrace my uniqueness. But not enough to resist the fantasy of what I was told medical transition could accomplish. The complications and hurdles were skimmed over, and my embrace of self acceptance was not established enough to fight the dream I had played in my mind constantly as a child. Frankly, I didn’t want it to; the idea of fitting into a puzzle that was always denied to me was something I was unable to resist.
The dream of being born male became an obsessive daily occurrence in childhood, replacing what happened that day to what would have happened if I were born male. What would have become of my life in general, where would I have gone, what doors would have been opened? The high school quarterback? Probably. The classic man's man, with an aura of masculinity dripping from me? You bet—society's expectation of what males would be checked off effortlessly. I would have transformed into this without guidance; it's who I was and am; the problem was I was born female. Being born male would have made me unaware that my outstanding achievements, acceptance, and fitting in was pure luck and nothing to do with anything I earned or who I fought to become. Just: "Here you go, son, you fit!" On the other side of the coin, I knew relatively young that not belonging anywhere could have been fixed instantly with an interchange of a chromosome as I formed inside my mother. At forty-two, when the medical industry told me I could be born again, male, I believed them.
No matter how hard I tried, I could not do internal feminine. I mastered looking feminine, but I was in-your-face from the beginning. Without having to endure and grow, my differences would have made one arrogant, misogynist man. Instead, I became someone who confused and piqued curiosity. "Who is this woman dressed to the nines, perfect hair, makeup, mastering the sway needed to walk in heels, understanding how to play the game, but something's not quite right?" I went through life having to explain myself or endure knowing that the first conversations I had with anyone would be about my sexuality and why an attractive women would ever want to be a lesbian. Why did I enjoy stereotypical male hobbies? Why did I challenge, face, never back down from, and dominate every man who came within my realm, and I never surrendered? Never! My needed explanations were not limited to straight males; I didn't fit in the LGBTQ world either, with my butch attitude but feminine look. The combination of who I was intrigued men, pissed off the LGBTQ community, and confused all others to no end. I was not what people considered a typical lesbian; I was flirty with men, strong, confident and never gave in to soften the blows intended to soothe a man’s ego. I didn't fit, never have, and the idea of fitting in became a fantasy that fed every step forward through my transition. I was tired of being different, I wanted to fit in and was ready to pay a high cost for it.
Testosterone worked fast on me. Within two-and-a-half months, pronouns were changing, people at work started to stare, and I was painfully aware. For the first time, I doubted myself, held back. I wanted to talk to Lynette, but she wrapped herself up in what my transition did for us as a couple, which fixed everything on paper. But there was nothing on the internet, no books, no YouTube videos of the emotional side of transition. Just joyful transgender people magically transformed; Poof! It took years for me to realize that from the moment we are born, elders in our gender teach us a secret code known to only the gender to which you are born. What people don't realize without facing two genders is that these differences are riddled throughout the beginning of transitioning and not met with love and care from a redirecting kindergarten teacher. These gender mistakes are met with adults peering at you, an unmistakable look that frequently happens for the first couple of years into transition. I call it, 'The Look' and it usually follows with a stranger saying, "What's wrong with you, dude?" What do you say? "Aww sorry, it's my first time in a man's bathroom, I didn't mean to look at your penis when I walked in; it freaked me out, sorry." No, you leave these situations learning, but they raise anxiety, and the constant question starts turning within a trans person's brain that has not gone away with me yet: "Did they know I was trans? Did I do that, right?"
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This is evolution, not something we need to be ashamed of as a society, and I cast no judgment. Looking male has taught me many things that one cannot know unless they have experienced it. I now understood, on a deeper level, why we place stereotypes on genders, why people talk about the limited emotions and lack of deep reflection men have compared to women. I experienced the emotional levels change in me, my dwindling need to explain myself, every little detail of my actions, wanting, needing acknowledgement of knowing someone heard me in the way I intended. These changes bewildered me. Nothing had prepared me for this, and my consternation started chipping away at my pillar of strength. I was the woman who projected a backbone of determination, someone who would be there to catch people or things when they fell, fixing, figuring out, enduring, fighting for success; the ever-confident woman became absent from me. And so began a bowing of my head, a desire that no one noticed me as I gently backed away from the crowd, yearning the first time in my life for the shadow of invisibility.
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This was the first of seven surgeries, and each one brought on new complications. I was surprised with how quickly I was able to push this process along and the fact that I had only been on testosterone for a short period. It didn't seem to matter to the medical professionals; they were all too eager to push me along and swipe the credit card.
It was days before I could sleep after my introductory surgery. The pain was something you see in movies about ancient times where a 16th-century medicine man hands the patient a wooden board to bite down on as they reset a bone. Everyone around me snickered and paid no attention, chalking it up to me being a crybaby. I wept alone through the pain as Lynette left to visit her family, undeterred by my cries a day after my surgery. I could barely walk, not able to sleep and only able to howl to relieve the agony.
My sister could see that I needed help and unable to do it called on my niece, who came to stay with me in Dallas. Mariah was barely twenty, and I could tell it was difficult for her to see me in so much pain. Mariah was more than a niece to me; she lived three houses down during her early childhood in East Texas, and I became a replacement parent to her and her brother after their father left, never to return. I had fights with her over eating her green beans; I was there when she needed to talk about her boyfriends. I was the one she called months earlier to introduce me to her boyfriend and asked for guidance and strategy on how to introduce the man who would become her husband to our family. I was the one who talked to my sister about the amazing man who became family and broached the subject of his nationality as an African American. We lived in the south, and Mariah knew I would never judge, but was unsure about the rest of our family. I was the one she called first with the concern she never had to have, because my sister fell just as in love with Charles as the rest of us have. What once was my baby niece I used to chase around at Chuck E Cheese scolding her for doing flips into ball pits had grown into an almost six-foot beauty who inherited the "Newgent" curse of visual appeal but wore it like no one I have ever seen in our family. Mariah wore her beauty as an accessory to who she was; her beauty grew from the inside out, her outfit was the person she became. She came together to create a dynamic woman and one hell of a sought after hairstylist/makeup artist in Dallas.
"Aunt Kellie, Grandma wants me to take you to Mineola to take care of you. I think it's a good idea," Mariah suggested in the familiar voice we all have between the ages for 17-22. It had a childish essence of lacking assurance but sprinkled with the confidence that comes with age. I agreed, and she supported me to the car, frequently stopping as I shrieked in pain.
Mariah was right. As soon as I hobbled through the doors, my mom winced and could feel my pain and anxiety as only a mother can. "Mom, it hurts the pain pills aren't working." My mother picked up the bottle and said, "Kellie, this is Oxy, one of the most powerful pain relievers you can get outside of a hospital. When was the last time you took one?" I burst into a scream, wailing, "Mom, they aren't working, please, believe me, they are not working," I cried one big tear, a constant flow without breaking, just one river dripping off my face. I pleaded, "Please believe me, Mom." I released what I had been holding in, shielding from Mariah, who was more like my child to me than a niece, and I didn’t want to burden her. But seeing my mother allowed me to crumble. She ran out of the room and returned with something in her hand. She forced it into my mouth and tilted my head back, pouring water into my mouth, "Swallow this Kellie," I did, asking what it was. She told me it was Xanax, and it did the trick.
Four days passed, and we developed a pattern. I woke, she brought in soup, gave me Xanax and Tylenol, and laid beside me until I fell asleep. She was miraculously there every time I awoke hours later to repeat the process until I could bear the pain.
Why was my pain so intolerable? Two months before my surgery, my doctor had prescribed a non-habit forming/non-stimulant appetite suppressant called Contrave. This prescription did wonders to help the fierce appetite I had developed since starting testosterone. The increase in my appetite was not a meagre amount; it was significant. I went to my doctor and asked him about what I was experiencing, and he assured me it was not just typical but expected.
He also said my sex drive would increase an alarming amount and to prepare for that too. I was not shocked by this revelation. In fact, I already had several secret conversations within my head about how many beautiful, exquisitely shaped breasts I saw in the clouds and wondered if they were always there and was I just noticing them or if something happened within nature that needed addressing? But before I picked up the phone to give this priceless information to weather experts, I realized the sexual images were appearing everywhere. I could sit still, close my eyes, open them, and instantly count off ten seductive parts of female anatomy I saw in the dirt, on signs I passed, tires on cars. A tire? I mean come on. The difference in my sexual appetite increased so much that one day something hit me. I had this whoosh of anxiety wash over me, forcing me to sit down. I became scared for my daughter, niece, sister, Lynette, mother, and every woman I loved, all women. I never understood until that moment how different male and female sex drives are. It made me want to grab my daughter and niece and lock them away. I knew, in my core, I was not someone who would ever assault a woman sexually. But I recognized that day how much more solicitude I needed to have for men. I learned that the line between doing what was right and losing control with sexual urges were significantly thinner than I ever imagined before I transitioned. I have looked at every man differently since that day. What I didn't understand is how powerful sexual urges are in men and how it's something you never want to test. That day and every day since has forever changed how I advise my daughter about her safety and any woman who asks my opinion.
The prescription my doctor wrote to help with my increased appetite worked wonders, he was spot on, but what he failed to tell me was that Contrave is composed of a combination of pharmaceuticals, Naltrexone being the significant component. Naltrexone is a pure opioid antagonist, not a slight antagonist, a pure form, meaning opioids 100% of opioid’s pain-relieving properties -were blocked. A shot of heroin while taking Contrave would allow all the effects of the drug, minus pain relief. This was one of many ways medical professionals let me down. I had three complicated, invasive, and major surgeries with little more than the benefit of Tylenol. I endured all three surgeries within six months, and it opened the door to a lifelong nightmare of PTSD. Masking the terror became a full-time job and haunts me to this day.
However, at the time, my surgeon and everyone around me had convinced me I just had a low pain tolerance. I allowed myself to abandon something I knew was not valid *** I knew what I was experiencing, what I was feeling and enduring, but I allowed myself to trust others about something happening to me and my body. I learned a valuable lesson, and I have filed it away, never to be repeated. What I learned from this experience is that human beings can be convinced of anything if rendered at the right time, the right way, and by the right people, and I am no exception. Don't believe me? Currently, society believes that a child confused about their gender and expressing suicidal ideation is a prime candidate for medical transition—proof enough.
by, Transman Scott Newgent
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Your brilliant personality shines thr this writing like never before. You are and always have been a gifted communicator and I thank you on behalf of everyone ever having considered these horrendous hormone treatments and torturous surgeries. You are in our pr daily and one day your reward will be great. Thank you for loving people enough to share your story. You are brave and courageous.
THE most unadulterated hell of gender surgery described brilliantly! Thank you for sharing this with all especially for kids considering this! (I had carpel tunnel w only Tylenol after it for pain , which did nothing, thought I’d faint ; how you endured this at all is beyond me!) NO ONE should be put through this incompetent surgeon should lose license and his assets! The very best piece I’ve read on this! Thank you for sharing to protect others!
Oh, Skelly,
Every piece of your story grips my heart every time I revisit it. You have invented the skill in your writing of being able to elicit combination of "funny, alarm and pain" in me in rapid succession. In particular in this post, your recounting the effects of testosterone and Contrave on your libido made me laugh and recoil at the realization of how thin that line is you mention between control and loss of control.
My love and prayers continue for your well-being, wisdom and stamina to continue your part in the mission. Hugs to you, my Friend.