Has anyone thought of cutting your penis off?

[Lyle Croft]

Cutting your penis off?...Just curious, sometimes i think about it, cause i can't STAND to look at this damaged appendage sometimes..but i don't.

I'm not trying to sound like those people who enjoy that kind of stuff but, me being circumcised as a baby seems to bother me at times :(

[SteveOther]

That would be castration and I have seen pictures of someone that has done that (sadly, I'm not sure exactly WHY but to each their own decision).
You can find it on BME.com or Google it. Essentially, it would be almost the same as cutting off your nose because you didn't like the way it looked. Take the time to restore or consider having your issue medically corrected if possible. Any part of your body, once removed, you are likely to miss it - unless it is diseased and requires to be removed.

[finman]

It is at least partly done in a so-called sex change operation (male to female) but all you end up with is a mutilated man, with male chromosomes.

[finman]

This is pretty much what we are against, cutting off a piece of the penis. Call it circumcision and the world turns a blind eye to the practice.

[admin]

That would be castration

Castration is most commonly removal of the testicles, not the penis.

[admin]

It is at least partly done in a so-called sex change operation (male to female) but all you end up with is a mutilated man, with male chromosomes.

It is the opinion of this forum that the gender of a transperson is the domain of that person and nobody else.

Most male-to-female patients will tell you NOT that they are becoming a woman, but rather that they have always been female with an anomylous body/genital appearance.

We respect the right of such poeple to identify however they wish, and to have surgery if they wish, but would naturally encourage anyone doing something drastic and irreversible to get ample competent counselling and medical advice first.

-Ron Low

[mark85]

Embarrassingly, I have thought about it, but that's not to say I've seriously considered it. At times, thoughts do creep into my head and I'm just so disgusted and uncomfortable with how I am, that I think that it would be a relief if I didn't have a penis at all. I'm not proud that I have these thoughts, and I know it would be an irrational act, but I have them nonetheless.

[mark85]

That's very politically correct. I freely admit that I sometimes shake my head at this whole "gender" thing. Chromosomes matter. DNA matters. It mattered long before there was language and culture (and "gender"), and it will exist long after. Gender questions are just luxury problems in an insane and inane society. Take away their food and they will instantly stop worrying about their gender and its correct pronoun etc etc.

In what way are you saying that they matter? DNA matters in its own way, language matters in its own way, sexual identity matters in its own way, and cultural identity matters in its own way. Sure, you can say that someone has particular sex chromosomes, but why should they be beholden to that as determining how they self-identify rather than their psychological sexual identity? What about when people have an extra sex chromosome? Should we disallow them from calling themselves male or female? What about people with the various forms of hermaphroditism? Some will have both sex organs. Some will have a genotype that doesn't match their phenotype, their sex chromosomes will say one thing, and their external sex characteristics will something else. Some will have male gonads and female genitalia. There's a lot of factors that go into sexual identity, and even if you want to throw out the human psyche as an identifying factor, it's still not always black and white. There's no reason to throw out the human psyche as an identifying factor though, it's how we define ourselves in so many ways, and it's just as much apart of our biology as everything else. Can it be influenced by culture? Yeah, and that's what makes gender ultimately more ambiguous than sex, but so what? People should be able to self-determine, that's the important thing. It's their body, it's their choice.

Take away food, and we stop worrying about a lot of things that are important to us. Perhaps we stop worrying about being circumcised as well. If you're going to hold gender issues to that test, you have to hold all other issues to that test as well. Saying that self-preservation is what we consider most important, doesn't mean that everything else loses all importance.