Hypospadias Information — Studies, Personal Accounts, and Other Resources

Hypospadias: Parent's Guide to Surgery
Get answers to the most common questions about hypospadias.

Adaptation of Adults to Uncorrected Hypospadias
"Of the adults we surveyed with hypospadias, most stated that they were satisfied with the appearance of the penis, voided in the standing position, and did not have infertility associated with the abnormal position of the urethral meatus."

Belgrade Center for Genital Reconstructive Surgery: Hypospadias
Note the high number of childhood hypospadias repair surgeries that failed and required additional surgery in adulthood. Also consider the aesthetic appearance of the natural genitalia as compared to the appearance of the genitals post-operatively. Warning: nudity and graphic images.

Intersex Genitalia Illustrated and Explained
"Unless there is an actual rare functional problem, our bodies should not be altered in infancy, and only those functional problems should be addressed. Our genitals should be altered only if we ourselves request it, to make ourselves comfortable in our own skin, not to make society comfortable by our medical erasure. Society must come again to embrace the diversity that is nature's gift to us."

Men Talk About Hypospadias
"I'm more annoyed at being circumcised than with having the hypospadias."

Do Boys Born with Hypospadias *Need* Surgical Repair and/or Circumcision?
An adult man with uncorrected hypospadias answers this question.

Do You Have to Pee Standing Up to Be a Real Man?
"In contemporary American culture, much is still demanded of "real men": To be commanding and composed. To be courageous and chivalrous. To be rugged, strong, and low-voiced. And to be able to pee standing up."

Treatment Modalities for Hypospadias Cripples
"Hypospadias cripples can be defined as patients with remaining functional complications after previous hypospadias repair... Between one and nine operations were needed to achieve the desired result."

Urinary, Sexual, and Cosmetic Results After Puberty in Hypospadias Repair: Current Results and Trends
"Cosmesis judged by patients remains rather poor in the long run."

Do Adult Men with Untreated Hypospadias have Adverse Outcomes?
"Urethroplasty surgery for hypospadias has inherent risks such as meatal stenosis, urethrocutanous [sic] fistula, and multiple surgeries. These complications can be severe and lead to multiple surgeries throughout childhood. This raises the question of why mild forms of hypospadias are treated with urethroplasty when many of these patients will potentially have no complications if left untreated."

Should Surgery for Hypospadias be Performed Before an Age of Consent?
"Hypospadias is a congenital condition in which the urethral opening forms on the underside of the penis or scrotum, rather than on the tip of the glans. It is estimated to occur in as many as 1 in 250 boys (Elder, 2011).

Parental Decisional Regret after Primary Distal Hypospadias Repair
"Decisional regret is a problem in a significant proportion of parents electing distal hypospadias repair for their sons."

Decisional Regret After Distal Hypospadias Repair
"To our knowledge this is the first study demonstrating parental decisional regret after providing consent for surgical correction of distal hypospadias in their son. Based on the described risk factors efforts aimed at minimizing complications and counseling about foreskin preservation techniques may be prudent to ameliorate decisional regret."

Hypospadias: Parent's Guide to Surgery
"Hypospadias refers to a urethral meatus ("pee-hole") which is located along the underside, rather than at the tip of the penis. In minor, or distal hypospadias, the meatus may be located on the underside of the penis, in the glans. In more pronounced hypospadias, the urethra may be open from mid-shaft out to the glans, or the urethra may even be entirely absent, with the urine exiting the bladder behind the penis."

Hypospadias: Intersexuality and Gender Politics (The Intersex Roadshow)
"Hypospadias is an intersex condition. The surgeries we perform on unconsenting intersex children without their consent have lifelong consequences. These can be profoundly negative for children whose genitals are dramatically altered--something that intersex advocates decry all the time.  But we should also question why we routinely risk the loss of sexual sensation in the glans of the male-assigned child whose urethra is in a slightly atypical place."

Personal Account of An Adult Man with Uncorrected Hypospadias
My urethral opening is low on the ventral side of my glans, with a concurrent flat ventral surface. I only learned I was different when I was 11 or 12 and saw in an anatomy textbook that the meatus is usually at the tip of the glans — a concept that was (and is) entirely foreign to me, since my urethra ends at the glans; it does not course through it."

Should Surgery for Hypospadias Be Performed Before an Age of Consent?
"While it has generally been assumed that the potential harms to the child of failing to perform hypospadias surgery are sufficient to warrant early intervention, recent reports suggest that many individuals with hypospadias do not experience the functional and/or psychosocial difficulties commonly attributed to the condition, nor desire surgery for it (Dodds et al., 2008; Schlomer, Breyer, Copp, Baskin, & DiSandro, 2014).

Tiger Devore: "Growing up in the Surgical Maelstrom"
"I spent many years in surgery whose purpose was to make me pee at the end of my penis ['Hypospadias Repair']. I’ve had sixteen surgeries on my genitals, and they performed ten operations by age ten, pretty regularly once a year. If they had just left my urinary meatus [pee-hole] where it was, at the base of my penis right by the scrotum, I could have avoided at least twelve of those surgeries."