Coming Soon: Ability to Orgasm After Gender Affirming Vaginoplasty

Many patients have goals related to sexual health when seeking gender-affirming vaginoplasty, and previous investigations have only studied the ability to orgasm at cross-sectional timepoints.

Our aim is to quantify the time to orgasm postoperative gender-affirming vaginoplasty and describe potential correlative factors, including preoperative orgasm, to improve preoperative counseling.

A retrospective chart review was utilized to extract factors thought to influence pre and postoperative orgasm in patients undergoing robotic peritoneal flap vaginoplasty. Mean days to orgasm plus one standard deviation above that mean was used to define the time at which patients would be considered anorgasmic.

Orgasm was documented as a categorical variable on the basis of surgeon interviews during pre and postoperative appointments while time to orgasm was measured as days from surgery to first date documented as orgasmic in the medical record.

A total of 199 patients underwent surgery from September 2017 to August 2020. The median time to orgasm was 180 days. 178 patients had completed 1 year or greater of follow-up, and of these patients, 153 (86%) were orgasmic and 25 patients (14%) were not. Difficulty in preoperative orgasm was correlated only with older age (median age 45.9 years vs 31.7, P = .03). Postoperative orgasm was not significantly correlated with preoperative orgasm. The only factor related to postoperative orgasm was smoking history: 12 of 55 patients (21.8%) who had a positive smoking history and sufficient follow-up reported anorgasmia (P-value .046). Interventions for anorgasmic patients include testosterone replacement, pelvic floor physical therapy, and psychotherapy.

Preoperative difficulty with orgasm improves with gender-affirming robotic peritoneal flap vaginoplasty, while smoking had a negative impact on postoperative orgasm recovery despite negative cotinine test prior to surgery.

This investigation is the first effort to determine a timeline for the return of orgasmic function after gender-affirming vaginoplasty. It is limited by retrospective review methodology and lack of long-term follow-up. The association of smoking with postoperative orgasm despite universal nicotine cessation prior to surgery may indicate prolonged smoking cessation improves orgasmic outcomes or that underlying, unmeasured exposures correlated with smoking may be the factor inhibiting recovery of orgasm.

The majority of patients were orgasmic at their 6-month follow-up appointments, however, patients continued to become newly orgasmic in appreciable numbers more than 1 year after surgery. Blasdel G, Kloer C, Parker A, et al. Coming Soon: Ability to Orgasm After Gender Affirming Vaginoplasty. J Sex Med 2022;19:781-788.