“Are you really going to the movies?”
I squirmed in my seat; I felt my face go red. I have a terrible tendency to look guilty even when I’m telling the truth.
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded when I called him sir and turned the volume back up on the television. I really needed to pee, but I wasn’t about to ask Shelley’s dad to use the bathroom. I noticed a dried date in a glass case next to me, and it struck me as curious. I said, “Do you make preserves or jam or something?”
Shelley’s father looked at me the way you might look at someone who’s just defecated on your kitchen counter.
“The date—the fruit.” I picked up the little case; he snatched it from my hand.
“That’s not fruit. It’s an ear.” I was quite content to watch “Wheel of Fortune” in silence after that, as Shelley finished getting ready. Once she had emerged from her bedroom and we were safely in my car, I said to her, “What’s with the ear?”
“Oh, my dad was in Vietnam. He doesn’t talk about it much, but basically he was an assassin.”
Needless to say, our relationship was short-lived, most likely because I refused to pick her up from her house after that first trip.
While I lack any dried ears as deterrents to amorous adolescents, I do own a gun, and as I live beyond the town limits I can legally discharge a firearm at a stranger who is on my property without fear of prosecution. I found that law rather barbaric when I was growing up (particularly when some buckshot sailed my way while I was rolling a yard with toilet paper one Halloween), but it seems a comforting thought now. Of course, the other night I couldn’t even bring myself to use a BB gun on the raccoon who’s been ravishing my trash and redistributing it about the yard. If I’m defenseless against woodland creatures, what defense can I mount against the tenacious hormones of adolescents?
I suppose I could welcome the potential suitors into my home—a Machiavellian tactic of keeping the enemy close. I might play it like every television dad, forcing the boys through awkward conversations where I interrogate them about their plans for the future. And then I’ll tell those would-be Romeos what fine gentlemen they are, what decent values their parents instilled in them, because it’s not every guy that would be so understanding about going on a date with twin hermaphrodites.
Patrice, my wife, says I’m overreacting. “Just because we’re going to have beautiful twin daughters,” she tells me, “doesn’t mean they’re going to be sluts. It’s usually the girls with daddy issues who turn out a little slutty.” I don’t bother pointing out to my wife that she hasn’t spoken to her father in eight years, but instead say, “I’ve published a book that’s primarily about me masturbating—badly. Explain to me how our children will avoid having issues?”
“Don’t be silly,” she says, not meeting my eyes.
I try to listen to her advice and focus instead on the mystery and wonder ahead. When the news of the twins came, Patrice and I moved out to the country, to the house that was abandoned with the death of my grandparents. I like the house: it’s a good, safe place to raise children. I sleep and fuck two feet away from where my grandfather died, and sometimes at night I scoot midway down on the bed and look across my wife’s belly where two girls share that rare luxury of not entering this world alone: in the dark, the moonlight washing through the windows, her stomach is a smooth hill of promise at the edge of the dark forest waiting outside.
Battle of the Sexless
Ashlea Halpern
He could’ve filled three Pepsi cans. Maybe three and a half.
That’s how much blood Talula estimates he lost the first time he tried to castrate himself.
Life had hit an all-time low. Depression hung around his shoulders like a lead suit. His libido had spiraled out of control, and he was masturbating as much as five times a day.
So in June 1994, at thirty-seven years of age, Talula made a decision. He’d had enough. They had to go. He stripped naked and sat in his tub, Betadine solution in one hand, an X-Acto knife in the other. He doused his genitals with the antiseptic until they glowed amber, then slowly, carefully, slit open his scrotum.
No anesthesia. No alcohol. Nothing.
His fingers searched the bloody pulp for the olive-size testes that had caused him so much torment, but he was starting to feel faint.
In that moment, everything made sense: The times he and his best friend would curl one another’s hair and put on makeup. The way he used to tuck his penis between his legs and admire his profile. How he would tie string around his testicles until they changed from red to purple to blue. The countless nights he prayed himself to sleep: “Please, God, please let me wake up a girl.”
As the drain swirled with blood, he considered folding up his insides, taking a bath and climbing into bed. Instead, he gritted his teeth and sawed straight through his left testicle.
“I just wanted to see what they looked like,” he recalls quietly. “But I’d dug too deep. I’d gone overboard.”
With that realization, he wrapped the gory mess in a washcloth, bound it with duct tape and drove eighteen miles to the nearest hospital. The medics in the emergency room treated Talula as an unknown—neither male nor female—but patched him up anyway and sent him for a psych evaluation.
After three years obsessing over the remaining testicle, Talula did it again.
This time he had help from a “certain friend” he had always hoped would finish the job. Talula handed the friend a syringe full of Xylocaine and a Burdizzo, a nineteen-inch tool used to castrate bulls. As its mighty jaws clamped around his scarred scrotum, the pain throbbed like poison darts pricking his every nerve.
And then…relief.
The certain friend, honored to have helped, bowed on his way out the front door of Talula’s mobile home, located somewhere along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.
And Talula, well, he was the happiest person alive.
“It was grand,” he says, in between long, audible draws on a cigarette. “I felt like Atlas, not having to carry the world.”
Every year, some forty thousand men are castrated in this country for oncological reasons. But in a culture where it takes balls to be a man, an emasculated male—even one doing it to save his own life—is viewed with pity and shame. Freud believed that castration was man’s greatest fear; the cringing reaction most men have to the very word seems illustrative of that. The vast majority of the medical community (and the community at large) still operates within the XX/XY gender binary; it regards voluntarily castrated males, or eunuchs, as little more than quaint cultural anachronisms.
For Talula to cut off his own testicles throws a wrench in society’s idea of what it means to be male—or more profoundly, what it means to be human. Yet whenever voluntary castration enters the public dialogue, it’s usually in the form of hypersensational headlines on the eleven o’clock news: Sex-Crazed Pedophiliac Would-Be Rapist Cuts Off Testicles!!!
The reality is far more complex.
Only one out of seven people who fantasize about castration ever acts on the desire, and those who do have myriad reasons: some dislike the way testosterone affects their mind and body; some feel powerless in the face of their sexual urges or long for the “eunuch calm,” a meditation-like state unimpeded by carnal desire; some do it for aesthetic or cosmetic reasons; some are in the process of transitioning from male to female and view it as a cost-effective step on the road to full sex reassignment surgery; and some submissives consider castration the ultimate sacrifice in a sadomasochistic relationship.
“We are real people with real reasons,” says Talula. “We live next door, we’re down the street, at your work. We have mortgages, credit cards, cars, and grandmothers. We’re just people that prefer no sex.”
And people who, given the choice, would rather not take matters into their own hands.
Talula didn’t want to self-castrate, but he felt he had no other option. He was afraid if he told physicians or family members, they’d lock hi
m away forever. He could either do it himself, or not do it.
What Talula didn’t realize at the time was that he had a third option awaiting, scalpel in hand, in Philadelphia—the castration capital of the United States.
For nearly forty years, thousands of people have traveled here to have their testicles removed by Dr. Felix Spector, a retired osteopath who had offices in North and South Philly, and around the corner from the Pain Center in the Gayborhood.
Unlike most trans-health professionals, Spector didn’t follow the guidelines set forth by the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, the regulatory body dedicated to the treatment of gender identity disorders. He never required that patients—transitioning or otherwise—undergo psychiatric counseling, take hormones, or live outwardly as women.
The way he saw it, the Harry Benjamin guidelines created too many unnecessary hoops. By the time people saved up enough cash to pay him a visit, they knew what they wanted. Spector believed his responsibility was to give it to them, “safely, correctly, and with sympathy.”
No questions asked, credit cards accepted.
Spector’s website claimed he was “a founder of the field” and possessed “arguably more experience than almost any other doctor” in the treatment of transpeople and men with overactive libidos. He even wrote a handbook on it—the twenty-five dollar cost of which could be deducted from the price of surgery.
When I first interviewed the eighty-nine-year-old doctor, he spoke slowly and repeatedly jumbled names and dates. It was a struggle to hear him over the all-Mozart radio program he was blasting in the background.
Spector was born in Philadelphia in 1917 and graduated from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1943. After practicing general medicine in Texas, California, and West Virginia, he moved back to Philly in 1954. Three years later, under dubious circumstances, he performed his first castration on a transsexual in Casablanca.
Word spread quickly about the good doctor who would lop off individuals’ testicles at their discretion. Patients described Spector as polite and grandfatherly, with a timid smile and a sly sense of humor—the kind of old man who flirts with pretty waitresses and cracks eunuch jokes to guys about to be castrated.
He was known for loading patients into his red Taurus and taking them on a whirlwind tour of Philadelphia, pointing out historic sites like Independence Hall and capping off with a cheesesteak at Pat’s or Jim’s. After surgery, he would snap their pictures with a Polaroid camera.
“Proof you lived through it,” he’d tease and write their name in the white border.
Business boomed with the advent of the Internet; at the height of his practice, Spector was doing ten castrations a month at $1,600 a pop. For an additional $1,200, he’d also remove the scrotum.
“I saw the need for it,” Spector says matter-of-factly. “People pushed me for help and it worked out quite well. Never had any kind of problems.”
Chris, a fifty-one-year-old medical courier and former patient of Spector’s, tells a different story. From the onset of puberty, Chris remembers feeling distinctly uncomfortable with his body. After years of garroting his testicles with rubber bands, he attempted castration with a Burdizzo. The failed effort left him mangled and more determined than ever. By June 2000, Chris had booked an appointment with Spector.
The night before surgery, Chris checked into a Center City bed and breakfast and shaved his entire scrotal region, just as Spector had instructed. In the morning, a chatty, well-fed nurse in her midforties greeted him upon arrival at Spector’s Rodman Street home office.
“I walked in and thought, ‘Oh my fucking God, what have I done?’ ” he remembers. “It was somebody’s grimy front room with an exam table and a couple of stirrups. Papers and junk all over the place. There was nothing sterile about it.”
Chris’s first impulse was to turn around and go home, but he hadn’t traveled this far to return with testicular baggage in tow.
He signed a consent form, paid the balance due, and nodded when Spector asked him, “Do you know what you’re doing? Are you ready to go? Let’s do it.”
The operation was done under local anesthesia, and ended quickly enough. Though Chris felt uneasy about the bandaging job, he walked the three blocks back to his hotel, rested, and ate lunch. By the afternoon, he was being rushed into the E.R. at Jefferson Hospital on a blood-soaked gurney. Spector had improperly sutured a major artery and Chris was hemorrhaging internally.
The botched castration left him hospitalized for a week and required two corrective surgeries to remove blood clots and necrotic tissue.
“I was a real mess,” admits Chris, who says he slipped into a “borderline psychotic” depression after the castration. “I would never want to put anybody through it. I tell the story of someone who thinks they were prepared, but wasn’t. All I wanted was that aesthetic thing. I had no concept of the side effects.”
Spector castrated George Mayo, an androgynous pet groomer from Maryland, who also felt unprepared for the aftershock. But despite years of surprise hot flashes, he says he’s never regretted his decision and doesn’t believe Spector led him astray.
“Those who go to Spector already know they want it. I did my research,” he says, then pauses. “Maybe I could have done more.”
Still, Spector was better than the alternative.
When wannabe castrates could not afford Spector, they would often turn to the very place they found him: the Internet, where there exists a subculture of underground cutters willing to perform guerrilla surgeries in motel rooms, at medical fetish clubs, and just over the Mexican border. Scissors, wire cutters, and livestock elas-trators are the main tools in a trade that sometimes uses Listerine as antiseptic and Tylenol for pain. Horror stories of desperate men blowing off their own balls with shotguns are endemic in eunuch culture, which partly explains why health professionals question their sanity. And why, in classic chicken-and-egg fashion, castrates resort to such drastic measures in the first place.
As head of the Eunuch Archive (www.eunuch.org), the Internet’s largest support site for the castration-curious, Talula and other active participants try to act as a safety valve, educating visitors on the everyday realities of castration and cautioning them against street cutters.
Madison Abercrombie, a thirty-one-year-old transwoman from rural Missouri, discovered the site too late.
Four years ago, Madison was named Michael and was newly married, working at his family’s salvage yard and living the American dream. But one thing haunted him: he hated his genitals.
He tried confiding in doctors and church counselors, but they kept using words like “sick” and “perverse.” And while he had heard of Spector’s work, he couldn’t afford the trip to Philadelphia. Random posts in a eunuch chatroom eventually led him to underground cutter Jack Wayne Rogers, a Presbyterian minister and Boy Scout leader from a neighboring town.
Rogers’ emails were short and impersonal, but Abercrombie was impressed by how well he knew the Bible. Rogers agreed to meet him at a motel room in Columbus, where, for seven hundred and fifty dollars, he would remove both his penis and testicles.
The surgery took seven hours and twenty minutes. Abercrombie says there were moments of pain so intense, she could feel the life bleeding out of her.
When Rogers realized the life actually was bleeding out of her, he told Abercrombie, “You can go to the hospital—just leave me out of it.”
And with good reason—Abercrombie later learned that Rogers had been convicted on charges of obscenity and child pornography, and was suspected in the torture and killing of a twenty-year-old man. The substandard operation left Abercrombie so grossly deformed, it took multiple surgeries to undo the damage. Three weeks ago, Abercrombie took the final step in her transition when a California doctor built her a new vagina.
“If I had not been turned away, if I’d just had some medical help setting goals of getting where I needed to be, it never would’ve happened,”
Abercrombie says shakily. “It’s a cryin’ shame.”
After interviewing dozens of people in both the trans and eunuch communities, the consensus is clear: in his heyday, Spector was a godsend to people seeking elective castration; in his latter years, he was a danger. Because the medical community doesn’t recognize castration as a legitimate treatment option for non-transmen or transwomen unwilling or unable to comply with the Harry Benjamin guidelines, voluntary castrates must tolerate indiscretions.
But on January 18, 2002, the Pennsylvania State Board of Osteopathic Medicine declared Spector an “immediate danger to the public health and safety” and suspended his license to practice medicine.
It wasn’t the first time Spector had received troubling news.
In the 1940s and again in the 1960s, he was found guilty of performing then-illegal abortions. Also in the ’60s, a Philadelphia judge sentenced Spector to two years’ missionary work in Africa. Then in 1997, The Philadelphia Inquirer indexed his numerous problems with the law, which included falsifying pharmacy records, committing billing irregularities, and performing a castration of “grossly inferior quality.” Spector was recently named in a malpractice suit in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas; he denies culpability.
Patients with postsurgical complications have come back to haunt him on several occasions, as has another familiar name: Dr. Terrence Malloy. Chief of Urology at Pennsylvania Hospital and Spector’s personal urologist, Malloy provided the expert testimony that led to Spector’s 2002 suspension.
During regular checkups, Malloy says Spector would ply him for surgical techniques and treatment advice.
“He had the brass ones to say one time, ‘Can I come and watch you do an orchiectomy?’” recalls Malloy, who denied Spector’s requests to observe what he calls a “totally repugnant” surgery. “It’s just common sense—a thirty-five-year-old guy does not want his testicles taken off. That’s the height of an abnormal psyche.”
Best Sex Writing 2008 Page 3