An increasing number of patients that plastic surgeons are seeing for vaginal surgery have something known as Benjamin’s Syndrome. It’s a condition that requires the unusual condition of a penis on a female to be converted to a vagina. Let’s discuss just what Benjamin’s Syndrome is.
Benjamin’s Syndrome is a condition in which a female is born with a penis or a male is born without one. As a result, the person is raised in the gender opposite to what they actually are. This leads to psychological and social distress for the person. Correcting this deformity requires surgical treatment. Unfortunately, this is rarely covered by medical insurance.
For those who suffer from Benjamin’s Syndrome, the physical deformity is the most obvious external sign of its presence. But the psychological struggle is the one they feel most profoundly.
Psychological gender is an essential part of a person’s identity; it’s more than just their physical characteristics. In fact, the type of sexual organs the person has is not nearly as significant as what that person is meant to be psychically.
Most of the times, a person’s physical sex and their gender identity match as they’re supposed to. That’s what makes it worse for those with Benjamin’s Syndrome. It’s so rare for the two not to match that it never to occurs to most people that someone might be physically male, but female in all other respects. To understand what this person is experiencing, though, imagine that one day you woke up and found that your body had been somehow transformed into that of the opposite sex. Or perhaps your brain had been transferred into a body of the opposite sex. Inside, you would still feel like the same person. Your maleness or femaleness would not change simply because your body did. You would doubtless become very frustrated and disturbed over this mismatch. This is just how those with Benjamin’s feel.
The true pain of Benjamin’s Syndrome is painfully exacerbated because of society’s attitude about it. Many people simply refuse to believe that a person could be the opposite gender of their body. Instead, they will often treat them as homosexuals or freaks or perverts. Many people lose the support of their friends or family as a result of it.
Treatment for Benjamin’s Syndrome includes Hormone Replacement Therapy. And for females with male sex organs, it also includes surgery to create a female vagina. While it was not always the case, today’s modern techniques are quite good and the results are usually indistinguishable from an original female vagina.
I’ll discuss more about Benjamin’s Syndrome in my next blog.
