I’ve had to stand up to surgeons who do vulvar cosmetic surgeries with little to no understanding of the surgical anatomy involved.

Last weekend I finished dissecting the last 5 of 10 clitorises with some plastic surgeons. Our photos will be the first to show the nerves of the clitoris in peer reviewed medical literature. They are superficial, just under the clitoral hood, most of which is actually clitoral shaft skin. Surgeons doing clitoral hood reductions almost never consider the potential for clitoral nerve damage.

I personally had my clitoris denervated in a clitoral hood reduction done without my consent during a labiaplasty, in which all my labia minora were removed. For years doctors — both male and female — told me clitoral nerve damage “couldn’t” have happened, that my surgery “couldn’t” have affected my sexual function, that I just needed to fall in love, etc. I worry we don’t hear about more victims because they are gaslighted in this way or because they are blamed for choosing the “wrong” surgeons.

It is amazing how people will believe ignorant experts “must” be right even in the face of hard evidence. Even when I held flyers with cadaver dissections showing nerves excluded from their textbooks in the faces of OB/GYNs at the ACOG convention, many insisted it was in their textbooks. They couldn’t tell me which ones of course. Some simply insisted they shouldn’t have to know the neural anatomy of the clitoris.

I had a lot of difficulty gaining traction on Twitter and was eventually permanently suspended. But here you can see how one urologist recognized a patient (me) knew more about clitoral anatomy than any doctor she knows.