Indore surgeons ridicule reports of sex change operations on kids

Experts in the field of medicine have ridiculed recent media reports claiming surgeons in Indore are converting girls into boys at a young age. The reports claim a process called genitoplasty is used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female and the surgery costs Rs1.5 lakh.

“In my opinion it is impossible to surgically convert a normal girl into a boy. Nobody can do this. Had the Indore doctors pioneered this technique, they would have turned into gods,” professor Ashley LJ D’Cruz, Bangalore-based president of the Association of Indian Paediatric Surgeons, told DNA.

He said such reports were confusing people. “The technique called genitoplasty is used for giving an identity —male or female — to infants born with ambiguous genitalia. It cannot be used to grow a male organ on a female’s body. Even the idea is ridiculous,” he said. 

“A female child who has external male organs can have them removed (called feminising genitoplasty). A male child can undergo penile repair (hypospadias surgery). These are well accepted procedures all over the world,” D’Cruz said.

He further said: “The condition called disorders of sexual differentiation is extremely rare and will constitute less than 1% of paediatric surgical practice even in busy referral centres.” In Indore, the local chapter of the Association of Paediatric Surgeons rubbished allegations of performing sex-change operations on infants. “If we can convert a girl into a boy, we should be immediately recommended for the Nobel Prize.

The fact is nobody in the world has achieved this so far,” said paediatric surgeon Manish Patel, who is also president of the association.

Patel said it was unimaginable to even think that a girl could be converted into a boy. “Even if surgeons somehow grow male reproductive organs on a girl, they would not be able to stop the development of breasts or the menstrual cycle. Such an entity would always be a girl with just one external male organ, that too non-functional,” he said. “We get one or two cases of intersex children every year. If media reports of rampant sex change in Indore were true, there would be many young girls in India with embarrassing abnormalities.”

A 2008 study by well-known AIIMS surgeon DK Gupta tracked 356 cases of intersex genitoplasty (1989-2007) at the institute’s paediatric surgery department. In his report, which was published globally, Gupta argued that the best age for sex correction was two.