The bizarre, testicle removal surgery at the center of a Daily Wire investigation made news a year ago, when a report revealed an underground clinic in Washington where two transgender-identifying activists specialized in combining the procedure with firearms training.
Over a decade ago, orchiectomy, a procedure used sometimes in cases of testicular cancer, used to be more difficult to obtain for men who identified as women, reportedly leading them to turn to underground clinics to have their testicles removed.
Today, the procedure is easy to schedule. According to a new report from Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, a gender-confused man looking to have the procedure can get cleared for the surgery in less than 30 minutes. Gregg Re, a producer for Walsh, got approval for the procedure after just a 22-minute virtual appointment with Plume, the largest transgender healthcare provider in the U.S.
The procedure can be associated with increased mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, and stress.
The ease of approval today presents a stark contrast with the past when the procedure was more restricted, and radical transgender activists paired crude surgical techniques with gun training.
According to a report in the Independent from July 2022, two transgender-identifying men ran a “secret underground transgender surgical clinic” from 2004-2006 in rural Washington. To perform the surgeries, they reportedly used equipment that they purchased on eBay, including an autoclave and a cauterization machine.
One of the organizers told the Independent that the clinic, though secret, was legal and approved by state health officials.
“We wanted to make sure that folks would never get a bill in their old name – simple things like that. They would be able to wake up and be surrounded by trans folks who knew how to take care of them, how to treat them. Never have to worry about getting misgendered. Never have to worry about ‘what’s your real name?’ Never have to worry about any of that,” said Eilís Ní Fhlannagáin, who helped run the clinic which was known as the “ball barn.”
Ní Fhlannagáin, who reportedly had his testicles removed in a living room, offered orchiectomy surgeries to between 14-16 individuals in the mid-2000s for only $500, a discount from the going rate of somewhere between $2,000-$5,000 at the time.
The underground clinic did require letters from social workers before they would remove their client’s testicles. After surgery, they offered to train their clients with AR-15s.
According to Ní Fhlannagáin, a jar with a pair of testicles was once left lying around from an operation right before state officials showed up. Ní Fhlannagáin hid the jar from the officials who were looking to verify business logs and other documentation.
“When a cis bureaucrat is getting in your face, and you want them to disappear, say the words ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ as loud as possible and as many times as possible,” Ní Fhlannagáin said. “They get very uncomfortable and they back away.”
While Ní Fhlannagáin said the clinic got approval from the officials, the “ball barn” eventually closed down in 2006.
The Washington clinic echoed back to another infamous case back in the 1980s when a San Francisco surgeon named John Ronald Brown also ran an underground sex-change operation before he was convicted of medical malpractice in 1990 and murder following the death of a man who asked him to cut off his leg because of a “sexual craving.”
As Walsh’s investigation demonstrated, the procedures once done off the grid in rural Washington and California have become increasingly widespread with transgender health services making it easier to get approval for such life-altering procedures.