The gruesome rise of nonbinary surgery

‘I can’t think of a time that a patient has come up with a surgical request that I haven’t been able to fulfil’, boasts Dr Curtis Crane in a YouTube video advertising his services. Crane is a leading US plastic surgeon who offers a full range of gender-reassignment surgeries. Notably, he also performs ‘nonbinary’ procedures on patients who don’t identify as either male or female. In doing so, he stands at the very frontier of trans ideology.

Crane practices at the Crane Center in Texas, alongside six other senior clinicians and a large staff. It advertises an eye-watering range of surgical options, from ‘penile inversion’ to operations that can give patients the appearance of having both male and female sex organs. The Crane Center even offers ‘eunuch procedures’, which involve ‘removing all external genitalia’. On its entry for nonbinary surgery, the website is keen to reassure prospective patients that ‘everyone’s journey is unique’, and that staff will work with them ‘to create a plan that is specific to [their] needs’. But these are not medical ‘needs’, of course. And they come with both a bodily and financial cost.

At present, nonbinary surgeries are still rare. But there is the potential for growth. Young adults today are emerging from a school system in which they are routinely taught that they each have a gender identity that may or may not align with their sexed body. Research earlier this year finds that three per cent of Americans aged 18 to 29 now identify as nonbinary (although it is not clear how many people who identify as nonbinary seek any medical treatment at all). A further two per cent identify as trans.