[3] Post-operative care may employ the use of suction drainage to allow the deeper tissues to heal toward the surface.
[3] Complications can include the development of lymphedema; not removing the saphenous vein during the surgery can help prevent this.
In some instances, the buildup of fluid can be reduced through methods such as foot elevation, diuretic medication, and wearing compression stockings.
The surgeon cuts the shaft of the elongated phallus and sews the glans and preserved nerves back onto the stump.
[7] While much feminist scholarship has described clitoridectomy as a practice aimed at controlling women's sexuality, the historic emergence of the practice in ancient European and Middle Eastern cultures may also have derived from ideas about what a normal female genitalia should look like and the policing of boundaries between the sexes.
[10] Isaac Baker Brown (1812–1873), an English gynaecologist who was president of the Medical Society of London believed that the "unnatural irritation" of the clitoris caused epilepsy, hysteria, and mania, and he worked "to remove [it] whenever he had the opportunity of doing so", according to his obituary in the Medical Times and Gazette.
Peter Lewis Allen writes that Brown's views caused outrage, and he died penniless after being expelled from the Obstetrical Society.
Some believed that mental and emotional disorders were related to female reproductive organs and that removing the clitoris would cure the neurosis.
Author Sarah Rodriguez stated that the history of medical textbooks has indirectly created accepted ideas about the female body.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that clitoridectomies have been performed on 200 million girls and women that are currently alive.
[16] Clitoridectomy of people with conditions such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia that cause a clitoromegaly is controversial when it takes place during childhood or under duress.
[17][18] In recent years, multiple human rights institutions have criticized early surgical management of such characteristics.