Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Spector says he’s only under attack because he provided a “nontraditional service” in a profession whose values “were engendered during the Victorian era.”

  Malloy calls Spector a “quack” and a “butcher,” and likens his methodology to assisted suicide: “This was not done for any lofty goal—it was done for money. It’s the worst type of victimization [that] preys on the most vulnerable people in the American public.”

  Beyond ethical queries, the State Board suspension cited two lapses in Spector’s malpractice coverage and stated that he was untrained, unqualified, and unequipped to be castrating anyone. As an osteopath, Spector was licensed to perform surgery, but he was also obligated to explain its risks and alternatives to the patient. And while he admits to having no formal urological training, Spector says the standards of the American Board of Urology and the American College of Surgeons didn’t exist when he first began his practice.

  A State Board attorney who asked to remain anonymous offered this hypothetical situation: “Say you were having chest pains and you go to a surgeon. If he says, ‘Let’s cut you open and do a bypass,’ and doesn’t check for angina or try medication first, it’s not that he did a bypass—it’s that he didn’t do all the things he’s supposed to do to make sure you were a candidate for it.”

  Spector never had patients professionally screened for psychological disturbances or suggested they explore a short-term course of chemical castration, which is at least reversible. Sometimes he would tell them to think the operation over and call him back later. Sometimes he wouldn’t.

  Can a physician be expected to follow standard protocol for a taboo surgery when there are no clear precedents, reliable data, peer-reviewed medical literature, textbooks, or medical experts willing to discuss it?

  “Look, all I can say is you can’t treat a patient if what they want is crazy,” says the attorney. “Accepted practice means knowing when to tell your patient that what they want is wrong.”

  Dr. Sherman Leis, founder of the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery and one of the country’s leading plastic surgeons for trans health care, echoes the attorney’s sentiment. Leis follows the Harry Benjamin guidelines on a case-by-case basis, but says he’d never do a surgery that wasn’t medically indicated. In fact, he finds the idea abominable.

  “There are a lot of sick, psychotic people out there,” says Leis of non-transmen seeking castration. “A legitimate doctor doesn’t operate on somebody who is psychotic. That’s incompetent medicine.”

  Chico State University anthropologist Tom Johnson and Dalhousie University anatomist and neurobiologist Dr. Richard Was-sersug disagree that all voluntary castrates are necessarily psychotic. They’ve spent years studying and surveying members of the Eunuch Archive and researching the realities of androgen deprivation. Together, they’re pioneering the sort of research that will ultimately be reviewed by peers, printed in medical journals, taught in classrooms, and discussed openly between doctors and patients.

  That’s their hope, anyway.

  “You still have doctors recycling prejudices from the Roman Empire, without looking at the very real eunuchs around them,” says Johnson. “It’s a human propensity to try to put everything into pigeonholes—this or that, either/or—without any consideration of the gradations between. There are not two sexes; there are probably fifty.”

  Gary Taylor, Shakespearean scholar and author of Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood, concurs; he says eunuchs provide a blueprint for the first post-human. “We’re entering a time when the possibilities of genetic engineering mean the potential for changing what it means to be human,” says Taylor. “But not everybody is going to accept the implications of our capacity to alter human beings. That’s the great philosophical and political problem of our future.”

  Until that day comes, people eke through the system whatever way they can.

  Social workers at Philadelphia’s Mazzoni Center for LGBT Health and Well-Being have taken a harm-reduction approach, providing patients with nonjudgmental counseling and informational resources.

  “We should be able to recognize the need and push for better treatments. Eunuch, gay, trans—doesn’t matter,” says Mazzoni medical director Dr. Robert Winn. “There should be no backroom abortions.”

  Sue Collins, Mazzoni’s trans patient coordinator, started presenting as a woman three months ago and empathizes with the eunuchs’ struggle.

  “Everybody says this is the act of a freak, a demon,” she says. “So all my life I tried to fight this demon inside me. Then I realized the real demon was society trying to tell me who I am.”

  When Collins came out as a woman, all but one of her old friends turned their backs. Her ex-wife cut off communication, as have two of their three children. “It’s such a tragedy,” she says. “Nobody wants this. Nobody wakes up one morning and says, ‘Yeah, when I grow up, I want to cut my balls off.’ We just want our bodies to fit with our minds and our souls. That’s all we want.”

  Whether it is abortion, alternative cancer treatments, euthanasia, or castration, society must decide where a patient’s right to demand an elective procedure ends and where a physician’s right to provide ethically acceptable treatment begins. Although many doctors refuse to remove healthy tissue because they view it as a violation of the Hippocratic imperative to do no harm, proponents of elective castration say it’s no different than removing extra nose cartilage, unbecoming cellulite, or excess skin on a baby’s penis.

  Furthermore, they say, physicians have a responsibility to prevent imminent or foreseeable harm. Could it not be argued that rendering a patient’s concerns crazy or invalid does the patient greater harm in the end?

  “That is the ultimate question,” says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Sexuality and Gender in Society. “For some people, the standard of doing no harm requires that the surgeon actually perform the surgery. If they don’t, ultimately the patient will undergo greater harm. But that has to be the absolute last step in a long treatment.”

  Wolpe calls this the “Kevorkian problem”: Both Jack Kevorkian and Timothy Quill were advocates of doctor-assisted suicide, but Quill probed his patients in-depth and advocated a strong psychosocial relationship before he’d ever consider lethal measures. Kevorkian helped some patients die within twenty-four hours of meeting them.

  “The idea of rampant autonomy ethics, where if you say you want it then what right do I have to ask you questions, is both therapeutically irresponsible and medically spurious,” says Wolpe, adding that the moment a patient enlists a physician’s help, that physician’s moral standing becomes part of the equation. “Any doctor has a right not to perform an act they find unethical. And you don’t have a right to compel them simply because you find it ethical. When you have a whole profession that finds [elective castration] problematic, you really need to examine why.”

  Jim, a fifty-seven-year-old eunuch castrated on a friend’s kitchen table eight years ago, believes it is a gross double standard. “If a woman went in and said she wanted her ovaries removed, the doctor would say, ‘We can set you up on this date and it’ll cost you X amount of dollars,’” says Jim. “Male goes in and says ‘I want ’em removed,’ it ain’t gonna happen. We’re left out in no-man’s-land.”

  Speaking as someone who performs sex reassignment surgery but has also been through the process herself, Dr. Marci Bowers of Trinidad, Colorado, says most doctors lack perspective of what it’s like to be on both sides of the gender divide: “Their self-esteem is so wrapped up in what goes on with their penis every day, they can’t see the forest from the trees.”

  While Bowers has yet to castrate a non-trans male, she says she would consider it after proper psychiatric counseling. “It’s very lonely to hold one of the only flags,” she sighs. “But it’s God’s will. We have the high moral ground in what we’re doing.”

  After the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania officially revoked his
license on February 22, 2006 Spector gave up his flag. He took down the website that had given so many disenfranchised men a glimmer of hope, mailed in his wall hangings and wallet certificate, and changed the spelling of his first and last names.

  He has taken up residency in a twenty-nine-room Dickensian mansion—rumored to be one of the most haunted properties in Ohio—and spends most of his time cooking, reading medical journals, and renting out rooms to thrill-seeking ghost hunters. He still hears from grateful patients now and again, but says he would just as soon put his past behind him.

  During our final conversation (Spector’s attorney advised him to cut off contact with City Paper after three phone interviews), he tells me he regrets nothing in his controversial career.

  “I have no feeling of dread or having done any harm or any wrong,” he says in a trembling, world-weary croak. “Philadelphia is full of people ready to tear you apart… [Malloy] has achieved his goal—he put me out of business.”

  In one sense, he’s right. But what’s more significant was the hearing examiner’s conclusion that castrating patients with no physical or pathological condition added “insult to injury” by exacerbating preexisting psychological problems.

  Beyond the courts, Spector’s case wasn’t helped by Italian filmmakers Gian Claudio Guiducci and Franco Sacchi’s 2003 documentary American Eunuchs, which provided a damning look at his practice. The eunuch community was outraged by the film, and Spector refuses to discuss it.

  He’s sick of fighting.

  Spector was recently diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. His words are garbled in violent coughing fits; it’s hard for him to get a word in edgewise. The prognosis is grim, and the doctors at the “big hospital” in Pittsburgh have thrown their hands up.

  “There’s not a lot of justice in this world,” he laughs bitterly. “Not a lot of justice.”

  What is the future of elective castration with Spector out of commission?

  City Paper anonymously called a dozen urology practices in the Philadelphia area to see which, if any, were willing to castrate on an elective basis. Some receptionists reacted with shock and confusion, others as if they’d fielded the question before. One nurse expressed concern that we were taking “a step in the wrong direction.”

  One phone call, however, garnered very different results.

  It was a call placed to Dr. Murray Kimmel, a board-certified urologist with offices located at 2301 Pennsylvania Ave.

  “I’ve made over twelve thousand people happy,” Kimmel told us. (Formal calls to Kimmel’s office went unreturned.) “People come to me from all over the country, all over the world. I must be doing something right, right?”

  According to court documentation and Spector’s now-defunct website, Kimmel was named an “associate” shortly after Spector’s license was suspended in 2002; since then, Spector has assumed the role of middleman, making referrals, answering questions, and collecting down payments.

  Like his predecessor, Kimmel performs the surgeries on an outpatient basis and demands no psychiatric evaluation, therapists’ letters, or waiting period—just two thousand dollars in cash or money orders. He does, however, explain the procedure in great detail, stressing its irreversibility and discussing its aftereffects.

  During our phone consultation, he grills us about our personal life (Are we married or single? How old are we? Do we masturbate at work? How many times a day?) and tells us a little about his. (He once received a hand-signed thank-you note from President Eisenhower for teaching sailors how to be urology techs.)

  He rambles tangentially, but there is one point he doesn’t want us to miss: It’s not his job to decide what’s best for us. If we take the final cut, it’s of our own volition.

  We tell him we’re sold and ask how soon he might be able to squeeze us in. As it happens, someone just cancelled his appointment on Monday. How does 10:00 a.m. sound?

  Talula is angry. He has just read an article in the March issue of Details magazine with the following headline: “Why Would a Healthy, Normal Man Want to Slice Off His Testicles?” It wasn’t the melodramatic wording or thinly veiled sarcasm that irked him so much as the opening anecdote: would-be child molester lusts after little boys, seeks castration to end urges.

  “This man is an exception rather than a rule,” stresses Talula. “I do not know of one man on the Archive that would want to hurt a flea.”

  It’s publicity like this, he says, that hurts the cause. “We need, as a eunuch community, a medical way to say ‘Yes! I want to lose my testicles!’ without getting sexual reassignment surgery,” says Talula.

  But until the medical establishment and society at large are willing to recognize another state of being—the gray area between male and female—Talula and people like him can do little more than boot up, log on and share their own horror stories. That, and hand out Kimmel’s direct phone number.

  “People will do it themselves if there’s not an alternative,” he says. “I know. I know because I did it.”

  Kink.com and Porn Hysteria: The Lie of Unbiased Reporting

  Violet Blue

  It’s no secret that I look at lots of porn for a living, but sometimes I like to spend a little time with people who are a little more obsessed with it than I am, just so that I feel like I have a life outside of the daily bump-and-grind. Mostly, though, I just want to see what the leading antiporn, antihomosexual, pro-life organizations (you know, the ones with pundits on CNN and Fox News and “friends” in the Oval Office) say about my job.

  Home of the “ex-gay movement,” Pure Life Ministries tells us: First, as more hardcore pornography is sold, more is produced, creating a demand for more porn “performers”—many if not most of whom are teens or look like teens. Second, as more “adult businesses” open, there are more public venues for anonymous sexual encounters and the resulting spread of STDs, including AIDS. Third, as more “adult businesses” open, more neighborhoods in communities large and small are adversely affected. Fourth, as more hardcore pornography becomes available, more youth are exposed to it; and the porn they are exposed to is more violent, degrading and perverse. Fifth, as more persons become addicted to hardcore pornography, more marriages are prevented or adversely affected; and more persons act out porn induced and fueled sexual fantasies—oftentimes in a criminal manner. Sixth, as more persons are exposed to hardcore pornography, more are influenced to adopt its “values” and lifestyles—which contributes to the breakdown of morality.

  Al Menconi, from the American Family Association, famous for its activism, informs us: “A number of Christian men have confessed to me that they clicked on a porn site out of casual curiosity. They just wanted to see what the excitement was all about, but they became addicted almost immediately. I’m reminded that serial killer Ted Bundy started on his road to perversion and murder by innocently looking at ‘nudie’ magazines as a boy. It only took one time for him to become hooked.”

  And let’s not leave out the AFA’s Reo M. Christenson, who advises: Pornography leaves the impression with its viewer that sex has no relationship to privacy, that it is unrelated to love, commitment or marriage, that bizarre forms of sex are the most gratifying, that sex with animals has a specially desirable flavor and that irresponsible sex has no adverse consequences—no venereal disease, illegitimate births, abortions, premature marriages, single-parent families or moral erosion. I see no way that a torrent of materials with this subliminal message, which ultimately fans out to reach people of almost all ages, can fail to have pernicious effects. Not that someone sees pornography and then rushes out to commit rape. That may happen, but that’s not the main problem.

  While what these powerful religious organizations are saying is hysterical (and not in the funny way), I actually don’t take much offense at it. They are, after all, religious. We don’t expect our religions to be unbiased about sex and porn. However, we do expect it of our media—most especially when it’s covering topics close to home.

  Last Fr
iday, I received an email from a friend who works at Kink.com, the local porn empire most recently famous for their controversial purchase of the Mission District’s historic Armory Building. He was asking me, as a media contact, for advice with a retraction: Canada.com had just published a story citing an erroneous study about the dangers of children’s exposure to pornography, using the photo and name of a Kink.com employee at the start of the article.

  My friend reminded me that there was a protest at noon against his company’s purchase of the Armory Building—and only a few hours later we were exchanging ironic emails about the headline article on SF Gate covering the protest, Steve Rubenstein’s “50 Protest Porn Business Inside Old Mission Street Armory.” My Kink friend wrote in regard to coping with another round of skewed media hyperbole: “Awesome! They just changed their erroneous caption of the guy washing the outside of the building from doing so in protest since HE WORKS FOR US.”

  The SF Gate article was little different than this week’s New York Times piece about Kink and the Armory—yet it is absolutely an outstanding, shining example of the lie of unbiased reporting.

  Steve Rubenstein and Jesse McKinley are reporters, and so we require that they report and not serve us with opinion, instead. In both articles, slanted phrases such as “dirty movies” were slipped in like a hostess silently sliding a coaster under your drink—blink and you don’t even notice it’s part of the judgmental scenery—when a more accurate term like “adult” could serve better. Rubenstein’s piece went the distance, making Kink’s employees into “manacled performers.”

  But the most interesting example was the presentation of unchallenged material in the form of quotes from people on the street as antiporn pundits—with no weigh-in from pro-porn pundits. Protesters were quoted as saying, “This neighborhood is already plagued with enough violence and prostitution as it is,” and “Kink degrades the neighborhood, degrades women and offers ‘dead end’ jobs that no decent person would want.” Such statements bracket the piece—with no counter-opinions about pornography—and are presented in such a way that readers could interpret opinions as fact. Kink.com was indeed quoted—but only about their use of the space.