A South Florida man’s penis was too large for his liking, so he decided to do something about it. “I was always embarrassed by the size of what I had,” the man confesses, “It didn’t fit my personality.” [1] The man goes by the name Gelding, he is a nudist and describes himself as a submissive bear. [2] Not being a man of “half measures” himself, the solution he precognized to get rid of this uncomfort may raise eyebrowls. He went for a complete castration. Consequent with his plan, he was surgically castrated in 1994. Later on, in 2011 , feeling that he was still a bit uncomfortable with the remaining of his male apparatus, he had his penis removed as well. He’s now what sexologists calls a “nullo”: A cisgender man who removes his external genitalia completely as a form of body modification. [3] Gelding is no fool, he knows and he is not surprised by the fact that people think he’s a bit strange for doing what he did. The story that led him to go to such an extreme is….pathetic, to say the least. He told the world what happened to him in an interview he gave to the Web Magazine Gawker: It all started with a fantasy ignited when he was playing soccer in high school. Another athlete approached Gelding in the school locker room, grabbed his nut sack, and said: “You have a man’s equipment, but you’re still a boy… You shouldn’t have such big equipment!” “He squeezed my balls and at that point it was just a fantasy for me,” Gelding confesses. Then it just dawn on him: “So how about getting rid of them for some reason?” [4] Years passed, and the desire to sever his scrotum from his body grew stronger and stronger everyday. Later on, Gelding suffered an injury to his penis during a high school soccer match that caused severe nerve damage. For years, the pain would awaken him up at night. Erections, too, were extremely painful. Like you will see, Gelding is not the kind of man that messes around when it comes to his psychological well-being. Looking for some mental equilibrium, Gelding initially tried castrating himself in what he described as a “sexual frenzy” back in 1991. After numbing his scrotum with ice water, the man tied off his ball sack with rubber bands then cut off about two-thirds with a kitchen knife. “It was like I was outside my body,” he told SF Weekly in an interview conducted in 2000. [5] But things didn’t quite go as he had planned. “You are in a state of sexual excitement, and then your body exhausts the supply of adrenaline,” he explained. “It simply can’t continue anymore, and you go into clinical shock, which is just about what happened.” In order to avoid the worst, Gelding got out of his “frenzy” and finally drove himself to an emergency room, where doctors stitched his scrotum back up. Three years later, he decided to seek the help of an underground “cutter” to assist him in ridding himself of his scrotum. He located a man in San Francisco with castrating experience who was willing to help him in his quest to become an eunuch. [6] Gelding confesses that the whole procedure to get what he wanted wasn’t a walk in the park. Hospital don’t chop people’s dick like that with no serious reasons. “I had a big dick, it got damaged, and I was a bottom,” he says. “I went through a long set of psychological evaluation sessions with a psychologist here in town, because that was necessary in order to have the penis removed.” Today, Gelding identifies fully as a “nullo.”
It is not transgender. It’s simply nullification of what you’ve got. A friend of mine Mack in San Francisco likes to use the term “mascunull”, because I remain as masculine as they come with fur and so forth. But I no longer have the parts. [7]
“The average person of both sexes will think I’m unbalanced,” Gelding told The Huffington Post in an email. “[That’s] their laymen’s knee-jerk reaction.” [8] And its not like he could just walk up to a urologists office and say he wanted to get the unique surgery done. He says he had to go through several consultations with a doctor. Yet its the conclusion that doctor came to that may surprise you most. “In my case, my psychologist took me through a number of long dialogue sessions and a full battery of personality tests to develop a formal profile,” Gelding said. “His finding was that I’d be better off in a ‘whole person’ view after having my penis removed. That was sufficient to sway a urologist to agree to do the procedure. More harm would result in the long term from not doing the procedure than doing it.” [9] Like everything else, there are “good sides” and “bad sides” to be a “nullo”. In his book, “Castration: The Advantages and Disadvantages,” author Victor Cheney [10] asserts that the surgery can increase life expectancy by thirteen years and improve the immune system. [11] Believe it or not, despite not having any genitalia, Gelding still has sex regularly.
Guys who are aroused by my situation are very aroused. I’ve got some guys who are pursuing me a lot. And they just like this idea, because there’s nothing there to be in the way. [12]
He claims to have quite a range of sexual partners, including a bisexual man who “loves the idea that I have a hairy chest and what is to him a very tiny vagina that he can’t fuck, but he can lick,” as well as a straight man who “likes to fuck me because I don’t have any male genitals and he doesn’t feel threatened by that.” [13 Another thing that people wouldn’t expect from him is that he is, nevertheless, fully functional sexually speaking, he explains:
A few men don’t know their own physiology to the point where they think if they lose their balls they can’t come any more. And that’s false. If you look at the physiology you see that the fluids are made by the seminal vesicles and the prostate. Very little of the fluid and the content is produced in the testes. I still unload. [14]
Gelding says that he now feels better than ever before.
… my mood has improved dramatically since going nullo. I don’t miss the baggage. I don’t miss the fact that I get into sex with a guy, he expects me to perform in some ways, now he doesn’t have that expectation. In fact, quite a few guys find it very arousing that they don’t have to have that distraction. [15]
The disadvatages of Gelding’s condition are easy to imagine, he explains:
One of the most obvious cons is I have to sit to pee, or I have to use one of these female urination devices. It’s an odd funnel shaped device that you can use if there’s only a men’s urinal. Also, sometimes I get urinary tract infections. There’s a shorter path to the bladder through what I’ve got now. So I’ve got to be very careful and keep it clean. [16]
For those who wondered, Gelding assures us that he doesn’t have the “phantom dick” syndrome like we sometime hears from people who have lost a limb, but he confesses that he has something different but nonetheless strange:
A lot of the nerves are bundled on the base of the penis where most of the sensation comes from. It’s not along the length of penis but on the base of the penis is where most of the sensations are. And I wake up in the morning with a feeling that I have a big dick that’s erect. [17]
And now the question you’ve all been waiting for: Can he still have an orgasm? As you would expect, Gelding give all the the most intimate details about eunuch urology:
With ejaculation, just before you reach the peak, all the fluid is there at the base of the penis, and right before orgasm happens it’s the urethra that acts like a rail gun and expels the semen. So when you don’t use the penis, there’s no force behind it. It just flows out. [18]
SF Weekly previously described Gelding as a “legendary figure in the eunuch subculture, where he acts as a kind of den mother for the genitally obsessed, someone to whom a man can turn when he decides the cojones need to go.” [19]
