Nonfiction

Vulva Phrenology and the GC Crusade

TERFs treat women’s bodies like meat and call it “feminism”

Content warning: this story involves abuse of human cadavers, threats against medical professionals, transphobia, body shaming, sexual harassment, and genital mutilation

Some of the Tweets referenced in this article have since been deleted. They have been preserved in screenshots.

I did not expect to wake up today to the news that “labia phrenologist” Jessica Pin, known as @MediClit on Twitter, has admitted to fingering a corpse in pursuit of her transphobic pseudo-feminism, but here we are.

If the above sentence reminds you of an Onion article, that’s because the entire situation resembles satire. But it isn’t.

Jessica Pin, who is not a medical professional but considers herself a “medical provocateur,” took to Twitter over the last few days with increasingly hateful, inaccurate, and truly unhinged comments about vulvas, many of which are based on performing secret pelvic exams on dead bodies.

But let’s rewind.

Who is Jessica Pin?

In October 2021, Jessica Pin appeared on The Daily Show to talk about clitorises. In an interview segment with Michael Kosta, she illustrates clitoral anatomy using a scaled-up model of the internal structures and describes her advocacy for getting more accurate diagrams of clitorises into medical textbooks.

When her initial contact with medical professionals went poorly (perhaps because she lacked credentials), Pin did what any woman would do:

“I realized there was a need for me to have credibility, so I went to my dad, who is a plastic surgeon, and I told him that I needed to publish a study. So I dissected clitorises with my dad.” [x]

The resulting study was published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal under the title “Anatomical Dissection of the Dorsal Nerve of the Clitoris” [PubMed]. Jessica Pin is listed as the third author of four. The other three authors, including her father, Dr. Paul Pin, are MDs.

When the study was largely ignored, Pin turned to social media. Her YouTube and TikTok videos did gain traction in the medical community, and several graduate-level medical textbooks have been changed as a result of her persistence.

Unlicensed Dissections and “Fingering” Cadavers

The fact that Pin is not a medical doctor has led many to scratch their heads over how and why she was able to “dissect clitorises” with her father.

Pin has admitted that she did not have permission to work with cadavers for her study. Her father initially bought bodies using university funds, but when a gynecologist complained that Jessica Pin did not have the required lab privileges, Dr. Pin appears to then have privately purchased several cadavers for his daughter to play with.

Conducting research on clitoral anatomy was this easy:

My dad asked the head of plastics at UTSW. He said, “Sure! We have money for that!”

But then our study got derailed because an OB/GYN complained about me being in the cadaver lab without proper permissions (an accident).

…

After an OB/GYN prevented us from doing our study at UTSW, it was still this easy:

My dad bought our cadavers, and we dissected them.

@bswhealth paid us back.

It was that easy! Stop believing there are barriers to studying women’s bodies! There aren’t!

Pin’s Tweets reveal a real dissonance between what is ‘easy’ and ‘normal’ for most people, as well as a stunning lack of professionalism, empathy, and self-awareness. Because Pin’s family is independently wealthy her father had access to cadaver bodies to supply for his daughter’s ‘research’. That is not within the realm of possibility for most medical professionals, let alone amateur enthusiasts.

Pin’s unlicensed autopsies, which she admits in multiple Tweets were conducted without the proper permissions and procedures in place, also involved pelvic exams that were beyond the scope of their initial research proposal:

With the first cadaver, I tried to stick my fingers in her vagina in order to assess relative location of [the] clitoral body, but then it got too awk[ward] bc [because] my dad was there, so I did not try again. 🙈

The language of “sticking her fingers” in the cadaver’s vagina is surprisingly callous, given Pin’s concentrated rhetoric around informed consent and respect for female anatomy, especially regarding medical procedures (more on that later).

Perhaps even more unprofessional is when she refers to her exams as “fingering” a cadaver for the purpose of locating the g-spot, which she erroneously claims is unknown in the medical literature:

G spot is not a medical or anatomical term. It’s just a name for perceived sensation so no one can decide what it is.

I tried to finger one of our cadavers when no one was looking to figure out if it could be the clitoral body. 🤫

Pin is demonstrably wrong that there is no anatomical basis for the Gräfenberg spot (g-spot), the area of the anterior wall of a vagina where the Skene’s gland (biologically homologous to the prostate) and urethral sponge can be stimulated for sexual pleasure.

Moreover, her furtive “fingering” of one of the cadavers “when no one was looking” reads — at best — as inappropriate and unprofessional (if the study was legitimate, would she need to conceal her actions?) and at worst as a gross violation of the body that amounts to assault.

Despite her unconventional methods (to say the least!), Pin’s research into clitoral anatomy and advocacy for better education for gynecologists, urologists, and plastic surgeons who operate on the genitals is, on the surface, an admirable pursuit.

She’s absolutely correct that women’s health and anatomy are neglected in medical research. Her goal of asking for “equitable coverage of the clitoris in medical literature & curricula to prevent harm” hardly seems anti-feminist — though, again, her shirking of professional procedures and ethical codes of conduct regarding her study of human cadavers is problematic and potentially alarming.

Unfortunately, Pin’s advocacy for better anatomical awareness and education about the clitoris is steeped in racism and transphobia.

In the following video, medical student Joel Bervell outlines some of Pin’s problematic behaviour toward black medical professionals, including the inaccuracy of her criticizing an illustration of a black pregnant woman and foetus (a rare sight) as supposedly glorifying female genital mutilation, or “FGM.”

Like victims of FGM (sometimes erroneously called ‘female circumcision’), Pin was left without sensation in a part of the anatomy essential for sexual function after a botched labiaplasty. This background is important to understanding why, despite being nominally ‘feminist,’ her work excludes black women, trans women, and those working in the porn industry.

The Traumatic Origins of @MediClit

Pin’s journey to this point unfortunately has tragic origins. In 2005, she underwent a surgical revision of her genitals (labiaplasty) that left her with reduced sexual sensation. She was 17 years old.

Labiaplasty is a surgery to reduce the size of the labia minora, or vulva ‘lips’. In a 2022 interview, Pin said that

…surgeons call protruding labia minora “hypertophy.” This means “excessive growth” and implies pathology. By calling all protruding labia minora “hypertrophic” they use their medical authority to stigmatize and pathologize half the female population. This is misleading and thus coercive. [x]

Concerned that her vulva didn’t look like pictures she’d seen online (likely of porn stars), she consulted her father, Dr. Paul Pin, who recommended labiaplasty as the solution to her insecurity and “picked” the surgeon who performed the operation, according to this tweet:

The parents don’t know better. Lots of girls say they have physical discomfort out of shame.

My own dad is a plastic surgeon and didn’t know better.

He picked my surgeon and trusted his confidence rather than making sure he was trained or experienced.

Elsewhere, Pin clarifies that she lied to her parents by saying that her labia caused her discomfort when riding a bicycle when they were initially hesitant to approve of surgical intervention. She experienced no such pain, but her dysmorphic self-image led her to desire labiaplasty to “neaten up” her vulva, which she worried was “unfeminine and embarrassing.”

Pin’s trauma is unimaginable, inexcusable, and horrifying to read.

Shamed for her completely normal pre-surgical vulva by her father and his colleagues, a 17-year-old virgin had her labia amputated and the dorsal nerves of her clitoris severed for “aesthetic purposes.” The surgery left her with permanent nerve damage.

Pin compares her elective surgery to both FGM (a horrific practice that deliberately limits sexual sensation to ‘prevent promiscuity’) and gender-affirming care, and is vehemently against genital surgeries of all kinds due to her traumatic experience. The tweet above, for example, calls for doctors and parents who “allow their children to change gender [when they’re] less than 18” to serve jail time.

Because Pin was traumatized by unnecessary genital surgery, she is on a crusade to prevent any other vulvas from experiencing the same fate. An honourable venture! However, she does so by taking her trauma and using it to traumatize and harm others, particularly trans women.

The Gender Critical Crusade

Pin has come to the public attention again because of anti-trans comments regarding the art of sculptor Lydia Reeves, who makes plaster casts of diverse vulvas.

Pin shared the following video of Reeves’s plaster vulvas with a caption about her botched labiaplasty and how she was ashamed of her labia, adding that she now thinks “they are so pretty.”

The caption of Reeves’s Instagram (reposted) video clarifies that

absolutely every vulva deserves to feel accepted and loved ✨ innies, outies, trans, post-birth, one’s that are more left, and ones that are more right, and everything inbetween… you’re all frickin amazing, unique and powerful ❤️✨

She had to clarify this after Pin’s comments about the project made waves on Twitter. In particular, Pin is less than impressed by the “innies” — those vulvas whose labia minora are not prominent — or the fact that trans women were included in Reeves’s art.

Despite initially calling the vulvas “pretty,” Pin quickly changed her tune, saying that “some looked mutilated” and that she could “tell” some of them were trans women’s vulvas:

I contacted the artist to ask if all these vulvas were intact because I noticed some looked mutilated.

She told me “Some are trans post op surgery.”

I have a big problem with trans post ops being included in a “vulva diversity” video.

She goes on to link a tweet about her labiaplasty as justification for calling the “innie” vulvas showcased in Reeves’s art “mutilated,” without evidence that any of those vulvas have been surgically altered.

In an Instagram story, Reeves explains that Pin “manipulated our convo to make it look like I agree with what she’s saying” though she “definitely do[es] not.” She writes,

I am deeply sorry for anyone who may have been offended from seeing the wilddd twitter storm from Jessica who’s used my work without permission to speak negatively about trans vulvas, offending people with innies too. This literally goes against everything I stand for within my work and work so hard to push against. [x]

(Instagram stories are temporary and eventually disappear. The link above is to a screenshot.)

Pin turned her shame into pride that she now uses to shame others in turn. Using Reeves’s art as the basis for a kind of vulva “phrenology” (the pseudoscience that claimed skull shape/brain size as an indicator of future criminality), Pin claims she can not only tell which casts came from trans women, but which came from cis women who were, in her words, “mutilated.”

These vulvas circled in red are, by contrast, OBVIOUSLY FEMALE.

People should be able to know what female anatomy looks like.

It looks like these!

How’s that for body positivity?

Despite claiming not to be a TERF, Pin applies her wackjob vulva phrenology specifically to trans people and then, having been called out for that, threatens to make content aimed at helping transphobic men identify if they’re “in bed with a trans [sic]”.

I will seriously make a YouTube video explaining the difference between trans and cis vulvas and market it as “how to know you’re in bed with a trans” if people don’t stop being insane.

The market will be the guys who believe trans women are men and don’t want to fuck them.

…

You all can keep attacking me. That’s fine.

I can also teach transphobic cis men how to ID trans post ops. Maybe then I’ll get support for vulvar anatomy mattering.

It would not be a nice thing to do, but I can go through the top trans surgeon results and explain what’s off.

The Tweets above are vile threats against the trans community. Mad at having been called out for saying that there is a visible difference between trans vulvas and cis vulvas (there isn’t), she immediately turned on the trans community.

Violence against trans women in particular is an epidemic.

So many cis men attack trans women they find attractive that there is an entire legal defense built around it: “trans panic.” Men who discover they have had sex with, or were about to have sex with, a trans woman can argue to have acted in a state of violent, temporary insanity after committing assault or murder. Similar to self-defense, they can use their “trans panic” to justify ‘reactionary’ violence.

By claiming that there is a visible difference between trans and cis vulvas — and that people can be “trained” to notice “what’s off” — is not only inaccurate and transphobic, it’s dangerous for both trans and cis women.

As a direct result of transphobic Gender Critical (GC) ideology like this, both cis and trans women have already been attacked for using the ‘wrong’ toilets because transphobes claim to be able to ‘clock’ when someone is trans.

Despite the fact that it is often not possible to tell the difference between a trans and cis vulva, the belief that one can will inevitably get women killed. Pin’s threats to amplify this nonsense directly threatens the trans community with violence, as well as cis women whose vulvas do not fit her portraits of an ‘ideal,’ ‘natural’ labia. Pin is throwing cis women under the bus in her attempt to get trans women murdered by their sexual partners.

And even if it were possible to tell the difference between a trans and cis person’s vulva (it’s not), the Gender Critical reduction of women to our internal and external biology is gender essentialism at its finest. For years, feminists have fought to be considered more than walking vaginas. TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical ‘feminists’) are ready to throw that progress away if it means excluding trans women.

If the idea is really that trans people are born in a body that just doesn’t match their brain, maybe someday we will be able to transplant brains into a head and body grown in a lab or something.

Until then, trans women cannot be female. Full stop.

GC ‘feminists’ are all about women’s rights until it impedes their ability to oppress trans people. Then cis women are fair game — for being too tall, too broad, too hairy, or in Pin’s case, having a small labia.

Ironically, Pin’s elective labiaplasty was gender-affirming care. ‘Gender-affirming care’ encompasses the many social, legal, and medical interventions that validate a person’s gender identity and lessen the psychological distress of dysphoria. While we frequently hear about gender-affirming care for transgender individuals — particularly now, when that care is being actively criminalized in the USA — cis people also regularly seek and are granted access to gender-affirming care, including hormone replacement therapy, breast augmentation, mastectomy, rhinoplasty, hair removal, penis enlargement, fertility treatments, erectile dysfunction medication, and yes — labiaplasty.

All Vulvas Are Beautiful

As part of Pin’s anti-surgery Twitter storm, she repeatedly asserted that ‘natural’ vulvas do not look a certain way — specifically, with small or tucked-in labia minora.

And despite claiming that she didn’t want women to be ashamed of their anatomy, she openly shamed one of the vulvas from Reeves’s project that had small ‘lips’. When porn actress Electra Rayne responded that the vulva in question looks like her natural vulva, Pin doubled down and lectured Rayne about her own anatomy.

Electra Rayne: That looks a hell of a lot like mine, and I was born with it! Just because it doesn’t look like yours doesn’t mean it’s not natural

Jessica Pin: It doesn’t. Look again. Look closer.

Rayne: Ma’am. I am a full time professional pornstar. Not only do I know my own body, my cunt is also all over the internet. I have spent hours upon hours editing video footage of my own hole. I am absolutely confident that this is what it looks like, minus my two vulvar piercings.

Pin: Perfect. Can you link to photos please?

Rayne: As this is not an xxx thread I’m not going to drop nudes and have them make their way onto who-knows-who’s timeline, including potentially minors. You’re welcome to Google me or scroll through my media tab and see for yourself.

Also, I don’t mind showing you bc [because] it’s public anyway, but it’s fucking creepy [that] you need to see photos of a strangers [sic] genitals to believe them about their own body

Pin: I Googled. Anyone who does can see you would not be capable of picking your own pussy out of a lineup.

Pin followed up by sending a DM to Rayne asking for photos of her vulva, despite calling that exact behaviour “sexual harassment” in another tweet. Moreover, despite Rayne’s concern about sharing pornography in a thread that could contain children, Pin proceeded to directly link an image of Rayne’s vulva to several commenters and demand they examine it, including at least one minor. See the tweets below:

While I normally wouldn’t call out a specific person’s behaviour in an article like this (except for big names like JK Rowling), it is clear that Pin’s unhinged Tweeting, which includes gaslighting, lying, deleting Tweets, spreading misinformation, body shaming, threats against trans and cis women, and sexual harassment via DMs, is part of a larger problem.

Gender Critical ‘feminists’ will go to desperate lengths to prove that trans women aren’t women, and that includes ‘transvestigation,’ or publicly accusing people of being trans using arbitrary metrics, such as measuring their hands. Sometimes, they succeed in outing trans people. Other times, they shame and mock cis women for having traits they associate with transness.

From Graham Linehan, JK Rowling, and Posie Parker to US lawmakers, it seems like the anti-trans crowd is particularly vocal right now. And that vocal minority is a hair’s breath from bombing abortion clinics.

No, really.

On Reddit, Jessica Pin once said she might “snap and just kill as many OB/GYNs as I can” because she wasn’t making headway in changing obstetric literature to contain more about the clitoris:

Neo-Nazis recently attended Posie Parker’s anti-trans rally “Let Women Speak” in Melbourne, Australia. Counter-protesters (trans folk and their allies) were pepper sprayed by police, whereas the Nazis and the TERFs were left alone as they proudly gave the Nazi salute.

GC and far-right politics often overlap, mainly in their gender essentialism. Both groups reduce women to walking wombs/vaginas who see trans people’s freedom as a threat to their ideology by their very existence. Scapegoating minorities for their own game is a shared tactic, as are spreading misinformation, doxxing, and threats/intimidation.

Jessica Pin’s history is tragic. A horrible thing happened to her, in part because of the way women’s bodies — and particularly our sex organs — are policed by society at large.

However, that doesn’t give her a pass to harass and shame other women in response. Her labia phrenology and transvestigation are an unhinged expression of a deeply traumatized woman trying to reclaim her womanhood, and she should seek professional help with that.

It is not normal to reduce women to the size of their labia, and call women with innies “mutilated” or “deformed,” as if there is anything wrong with small labia. To do so is not only to treat other women as she was treated, leading to the sad outcome of her botched cosmetic surgery, but also to treat women like she treated the cadavers her daddy bought her: as meat.

Women’s bodies, alive or dead, aren’t hers to poke, examine, and cut up like chopped liver. Because when we treat women’s bodies like meat and reduce living women to those bodies/body parts, our fundamental rights become even more precarious than ever — especially bodily autonomy and reproductive choice.

And thus, horrifically, we end up with this:

Tom Farr: I say this sincerely: I can imagine few things more horrifying, dystopian, and signifying of total societal moral collapse than harvesting the bodies of dead women and keeping them functionally “alive” as surrogates. Surrogacy must be eradicated.

Jessica Pin: But if they are already brain dead, what is the moral issue?

Because nothing says ‘feminism’ like turning dead women’s bodies into breeding farms.

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