Marci Bowers admits many patients cannot orgasm after treatment
Robby Starbuck said:
“Even some leaders in the field of what you do out there, like Marci Bowers, admit that a large number of these kids are not going to have full sexual function to be able to orgasm.”
Citing the most prominent gender surgeon in the United States, who is themselves transgender, as the source makes the claim hard to dismiss as anti-trans bias. If even an insider is saying this, it seems credible.
Marci Bowers raised specific technical concerns about sensation outcomes in vaginoplasty for patients who had begun puberty blockers at very early pubertal stages, and raised them precisely because they care about improving surgical results, not because they oppose gender-affirming care. Taking that narrow, procedurally specific observation and presenting it as a general verdict on whether trans young people will have satisfying sexual lives is a significant distortion of what was actually said. The evidence on sexual function after gender-affirming surgery is not a single bleak number: outcomes vary considerably by procedure, timing, technique, and individual, and a great many people describe their sexual lives after transition as incomparably better than before. When young trans people and their families hear a decontextualised half-quote and walk away from care because of it, the harm is real and it is lasting.
What I said at the time:
“Carcy Bowers is transgender. You're an adult. You had you had gender affirming care when you were young. Do you have an orgasm? Because when I ask them, they're like, Yeah, I love it. And I have much, much, much better sex now than I did when I had, ugh, those other body parts that didn't match.”
Young trans people and their families are frightened away from care by a decontextualised quote that misrepresents what a leading clinician actually said and why.