The operating room staff performs the surgery. | Getty Images
A new report highlights a growing trend of trans-identified and non-binary people undergoing surgeries to have both male and female genitalia. A conservative academic says this trend makes the debate over gender identity even more “enigmatic.”
🔴 It took 14 male artists against 12 female artists to balance the battle.
The report, published by VICE last Monday, contains interviews with several people who call themselves “Salmacians,” a term for those who research bigogenital anatomy.
The expression is derived from the Greek myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditeand the number of online trans communities using the term has increased.
In the myth, Salmacis merged with her lover, Hermaphrodite, to become an androgynous being after asking the gods to unite the couple. Science fiction writer Raphael Carter coined the phrase “Salmacians” in the 1990s to describe people who wish to have mixed genitalia, according to Vice.
While people who identify as trans typically undergo surgery or take medication to look like the opposite sex, the article details the process of “non-binary bottom surgeries” for people seeking to achieve bigogenital anatomy.
Jay W. Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, religion and the family of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, believes that such surgeries are “evidence of the logic of gender ideology”.
“Many casual observers believe that gender ideology simply claims that biological males can have a female gender identity, and vice versa,” wrote Richards, who is also the William E. Simon Principal Investigator on the religious freedom and civil society at the Heritage Foundation. in a statement Monday to Christian Post.
“This statement is an enigma in itself. But gender ideology denies the meaning, even reality, of biological sex,” he continued. “A person’s gender identity determines who they “really” are – regardless of their sexual body. And gender identity, according to its champions, is defined without reference to sex. »
The researcher wondered what gender identity is rooted in if it is not based on “real sexual differences.”
While it focuses on the “meaning” of gender, Richards cautioned that this concept has no “limiting principle.”
“The simple idea that men present themselves as women, and vice versa, is already obsolete,” he wrote. “In its place is a growing variety of concocted gender identities. »
One person interviewed by VICE, Hyde Goltz, 42, has a vagina and a “surgically constructed penis.” Golz and the outlet’s three other Salmacians claimed that undergoing such surgeries put them at odds with medical providers and other trans-identified people.
Goltz, who runs a blog page about transition, has received derogatory messages from other trans-identified people. The messages accuse Goltz of “mocking” the movement by “only doing half-heartedly.”
