Who Asked for This? Eunuchs in WPATH’s Standards of Care
Your questions about eunuchs, answered.
by Evan Urquhart
Assigned Media exists to examine anti-trans propaganda, and one theme we’ve come across, mostly in fringe right-wing outlets, is pointing out that there is a chapter on eunuchs in WPATH’s Standards of Care. In this article we’ll answer some basic questions about the chapter and the eunuchs it describes.
Question: Is there really a chapter on eunuchs in WPATH’s most recent Standards of Care?
Answer: There is, in fact, a chapter on eunuchs in the most recent standards of care, a set of professional guidelines produced by the professional organization WPATH intended to guide medical professionals working with transgender patients. WPATH’s most recent guidelines, Soc 8, were released in September 2022.
Chapter 9 of Soc 8 discusses eunuchs. It defines eunuchs as “individuals are those assigned male at birth (AMAB) and wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals, or genital functioning. They also include those whose testicles have been surgically removed or rendered nonfunctional by chemical or physical means and who identify as eunuch.”
Q: Why is there a WPATH chapter on eunuchs?
A: Based on what’s written in the Soc 8, the primary medical rationale for including eunuchs seems to be their risk of self-injury. Guideline 9.2 states “We recommend health care professionals consider medical intervention, surgical intervention, or both for eunuch individuals when there is a high risk that withholding treatment will cause individuals harm through self-surgery, surgery by unqualified practitioners, or unsupervised use of medications that affect hormones.” This section references a 2014 paper in the journal Nature which describes self-identified eunuchs and “eunuch wannabes” who self-castrated or intentionally injured their testicles in order to necessitate a surgical removal.
In other words, it’s a harm-reduction rationale.
Q: Has the wider transgender community advocated for the acceptance and inclusion of eunuchs in the standards of care?
A: While we’re not aware of any opposition to the inclusion of eunuchs in the WPATH guidelines, there does not seem to be any activity from transgender groups that led to this.
Some right-wing outlets have described the chapter as being due to the excesses of trans activism. However, articles on the topic in places such as the Christian website World and right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail, which portray the chapter as activist led, have done so by describing WPATH itself as an activist group. While some self-described eunuchs may identify as trans and may have some link to the wider transgender community, we found no good evidence of a eunuch-identity presence in transgender communities online or off.
Q: How common are eunuchs?
A: It is impossible to say how common it is for male-assigned people to identify as eunuchs or seek castration for the purpose of solidifying a eunuch identity. WPATH’s guidelines do not provide any information on this question, and the studies we reviewed did not seem to have been conducted in a way that would estimate the prevalence of eunuch identity in the population at large.
Using inductive reasoning, the number of male-assigned people who associate themselves with this label seems small enough that online forums devoted to eunuchs are sleepy and slow, in contrast to the large number of active communities you can typically find online dealing with every subject under the sun.
Q: Why do people become eunuchs?
A: A 2022 paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior survey of the Eunuch Archive internet community looked at the responses of over 200 people who claimed to have been chemically or surgically castrated and who identified as eunuchs. In open-ended responses, researchers coded over 46 percent as desiring castration to achieve their “preferred self.” About 13 percent mentioned an erotic interest as a motivating factor. Other motivations mentioned were achieving a smooth appearance and desiring a reduction in the person’s sex drive. (Because this information came from anonymous surveys of an online community it is impossible to know how representative these answers are.)
Q: Did WPATH include material from the Eunuch Archive? Why?
A: WPATH included references to the Eunuch Archive, an online forum that serves people who identify as eunuchs and also men whose interest in castration and eunuchs remains forever in the realm of sexual fantasy. Some right-wing articles have mentioned this and described some of the sexual fantasy material on the site as a way to delegitimize the chapter in the standards of care.
It is not known why WPATH included references to the Eunuch Archive. However, it is not particularly unusual for community materials to be referenced within a discussion of a community in a scientific paper and does not imply the community material should itself be viewed as a source of scientific information. Some of the research on self-identified eunuchs has been conducted using surveys of members of the Eunuch Archive, and there does not appear to be all that much information about eunuchs outside of the site.
As best we can tell, without having received comment from WPATH, the purpose of the chapter on eunuchs seems to be to familiarize providers with this small community of people so that if they encounter someone from it who is likely to engage in self-harm they can act in a way that minimizes the risks to that patient. Including reference to the primary internet gathering place for self-identified eunuchs would seem to fit within that goal of helping providers understand a type of patient they might see.
Q: Are there eunuchs in the Bible?
A: Yes. Eunuchs are in the Christian bible because eunuchs were a feature of the social reality in biblical times. In Matthew 19, in response to a question about marriage, Jesus is described as saying,” For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who had made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”
The three groups of eunuchs described would seem to match roughly onto men with intersex conditions, men who were castrated as slaves, and men who castrated themselves willingly. Some people have used this passage in Matthew to argue for a more expansive understanding of gender among members of the Christian faith.
Q: What does WPATH have to say about the inclusion of eunuchs in the most recent standards of care?
A: Assigned reached out to WPATH over a week ago seeking to speak with an expert on this topic. WPATH responded that there was no one available to speak with us before our publication date.
Q: Anything else?
A: It is very difficult to say much with any precision about self-identified eunuchs. A few bad-faith actors on the right have sought to use the lack of familiarity people have with eunuchs, combined with the discomfort many people feel at the idea of castration, to further their political goals. Those goals include ridiculing anything they can loosely connect to trans people or trans rights. Members of the trans community are naturally wary of saying or doing anything to further stigmatize a small group of people who should clearly have the same rights to privacy, bodily autonomy, and medical decision-making as anyone else. However, there do not seem to be many connections, if any, between communities of self-described eunuchs, such as they exist, and the much larger and more well-established transgender community.
