When a person "cries out for help," I have observed two rather common basic responses from other people, and an assortment of rather uncommon basic responses. The common responses are, "I don't want to hear about it," and "Tell me more." The uncommon responses are of the form, "How may I be of useful help?"
The common responses are, in my lifelong experience thus far, of denial, in one way or another, of the validity of the expressed need for help, as though another person can better understand the need of the person crying out for help than the person who is crying out. I find that to be somewhere near the core of the supposed existential human tragedy.
For what it may be worth, although I identify at the core of my awareness as inextricably transgender (or transgendered, if that is the preferred word), for me, being transgendered alone would not have led me to my 1986 orchiectomy. My sense of cancer risk, from a genetic condition now labeled attenuated familial adenomatous polyposis, was far more than sufficient for me to seek both removal of my testicles and removal of my colon in the summer of 1986.
While I am well aware of castration done successfully (people having survived it alive), I am unaware of anyone having ever done a self-colectomy, nor can I imagine it ever being possible for a person to do a self-colectomy and remain alive. I had to seek and find doctors who were able to understand that my need for surgeries was not negotiable.
For me, given my understanding of biology and cancer and my personal a-priori cancer risk, not having gotten my orchiectomy and my colectomy in 1986 was indistinguishable from my willfully choosing to commit suicide by neglect of my need for bodily safety from cancer the risk of which, as I understood my family medical history, would have, in the orthodox Christian sense, have been tantamount to my demanding that I be put to eternal torment in the worst hell that would be worse than can ever be imagined.
Though, as an autistic person, I have been met with what I experienced as shattering torture, most intensely by my second grade teacher and grade school principal for the first about-three-quarters of second grade, no amount of abuse from people who disrespect transgender(ed) people, and no amount of abuse from people who disrespect autistic people, has yet had any effect upon me other than to increase my resolve to avert any form of implementation of any suicide plan.
There have been people who have apparently committed suicide by mistake. Sylvia Plath may be an example of one such person, for all I can yet understand.
In my understanding of life and what human life is about, "Desire to become a eunuch that my sexual desires will not be in conflict with God's will for my life," is as valid a reason as any other for effectively seeking and receiving a bilateral orchiectomy.
I have never allowed another person to define who I am in terms of my innermost sense of personhood; to me, people who successfully coerce other people into denying their innermost sense of self are among the most interpersonally abusive people I have ever encountered. Alas, in my understanding of humanity, people who so coerce others were themselves so coerced; people who abuse other people do so in acting out their prior experiences of having been abused by other people, and this pattern of abuse being propagated from one generation to the next has, in my bioengineering research findings, apparently been a human socialization mandate, at least in every society in which shame is a necessary aspect of social organization, for tens of thousands of years.
So, in 1986, how was I able to get a safe and effective orchiectomy? I will not name the doctors, and will describe the process that worked for me, albeit in a way that effectively rules out identifying any of the doctors.
I began by recognizing my innermost sense of self, and recognizing that I would have to be suicidal to not effectively seek and receive both the orchiectomy and colectomy. Because my dad had "almost died" from prostate disease about 15 years before he died as a consequence of metastatic colon cancer, I set out first to arrest what I deemed unconscionable prostate cancer death risk.
I consulted a urologist who was a colleague of my primary care physician. The urologist refused to consider my understanding of cancer risk, and indicated that what I wanted was indicative of psychosis.
I consulted a psychiatrist with expertise in human sexuality, and determined that my concern was not indicative of psychosis.
I returned to the urologist, who then stated that he/she would not do anything, but "a doctor in a third-rate hospital" might do as I was requesting. However, that urologist also indicated that there would be no trace of our having talked about cancer risk and a possible orchiectomy in her/his medical records regarding me.
I obtained an Elastrator and bands from a farm supply company, to use as a form of persuader in the manner of, "If you won't, I will..."
Allowing that vasectomy clinics might qualify as third-rate hospitals because of their limited treatment options, I set about calling vasectomy clinics within a radius of about 200 miles from where I lived.
With each vasectomy clinic I called, I learned more and more effectively how to communicate my sense of need for cancer prevention.
Eventually, I came in contact with a doctor whose dad had died following ineffective prostate cancer treatment, and who was able to understand my sense of risk enough to agree to do the orchiectomy, but only with the provision that there would be no record to be found of his having done it; and with the provision that I would never, never ever, identify him/her.
On the arranged day, after my work day was over, I went to the doctor, got my orchiectomy, the outcome of which was uneventful, and was properly at work, on time, the very next morning, as though nothing of consequence had happened.
The very next week, my older brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the form of cancer, the risk of which I had set out to prevent.
While my sense of being transgendered was never such as to lead me to get an orchiectomy for that reason alone, it surely did make getting the orchiectomy as a cancer-risk-minimizing effort remarkably free of inner conflict for me.
I was, for a number of years, a member of a "gender society" in one of the largest of the cities in the U.S.
Along the way, one member asked me why I did not cross-dress. My reply, "What makes you think I am not cross-dressed now?" When I tell people about that event, many people laugh. The person to whom I first said that did not laugh.
Because it helps to manage my sense of stress in social situations, I have effectively cross-dressed for my whole life.
I can pass as male in simple social situations. While I am autistic in the Kanner sense, I can pass as having Asperger's Syndrome in simple social settings, and can also pass as not autistic in very simple social settings.
Like Walter White, who was the head of the NAACP for many years, I identify as being a colored person, yet can pass as ''white" (a concept that I find impossible to actually understand) in simple social situations.
Walk past me in the aisle of a grocery store, and you may mistake me for being, in the social convention sense, "normal." I can often pass as being a normal person.
However, my understanding of biology informs me that I am actually neither more nor less normal than is anyone else, because independent assortment of genotypic and phenotypic traits is normal.
Indeed, the whole "normal curve" is normal.
For myself, the cost of my orchiectomy, which was done in the manner of "a radical vasectomy" was much less than I would expect that an ambulance ride and post-self-botched-surgery aftercare would have cost me.
What would I do now, were I aware of the Eunuch Archive and finding an orchiectomy appropriate in terms of the needs of my life in terms of its quality? I would refer people to the Archive, the better to inform those who could provide proper care if they understood the need some of us have accurately, of the alternatives to being given proper medical care appropriate to the needs of the individual person seeking actually appropriate care and surgical treatment.
There may be one advantage I had in getting my "radical vasectomy" (bilateral orchiectomy, that is). As part of my bioengineering education, I had taken the same medical physiology classes that future surgeons take. One of the physiology laboratory procedures I had done was a bilateral orchiectomy on a laboratory critter.
Knowing that I was transgendered when I did that laboratory critter bilateral orchiectomy, I had studied the medical literature in formidable detail to understand the various methods used and their risks, and used the procedure I found to pose the lowest overall risk in doing that laboratory critter bilateral orchiectomy.
When I sought a vasectomy doctor for my orchiectomy, my having done a laboratory critter bilateral orchiectomy as part of my medical physiology bioengineering education was plausibly vastly more persuasive than the Elastrator and bands.
I happen to be the sort of bioengineer who corrects errors I find that doctors are making regarding my medical care when I sense that the error is serious enough to warrant being corrected prior to a medical care blunder.
I corrected the resistance-to-my-bilateral-orchiectomy blunder before that blunder led to the sort of terminal cancer that terminated my dad's and brother's lives.
For all I yet know, the sort of accuracy of thinking that characterizes some aspects of the autism spectrum may have formidable merit in the future of humanity...
Why am I posting this? So that others may use it as part of being persuasive in getting their needs met. As for permission, this particular posting of mine is posted with a Culture Free Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)" license:
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Having difficulty getting a safe and proper orchiectomy? How about printing out this post and taking a copy of it to whoever might wake up and recognize the validity of the needs of some people for a bilateral orchiectomy for the sake of actual quality of experienced life? What better justification could ever be found than the quality of life a person actually has?
It made no sense to me to put my life at risk to avoid putting my life at risk. And putting my life at risk to prevent putting my life at risk has not yet made any sense to me.
