A reality TV surgeon was let go from the University of Miami Health System after he was caught posting images of a transgender patient’s severed genitals on his Instagram.com account.
Dr. Christopher Salgado performed sex reassignment surgery on an unidentified transgender patient. He then uploaded an image of the patient’s genitals to his secret Instagram account.
Salgado is no longer employed at the hospital, the University of Miami said in a press release Tuesday.
According to The Trans Advocate‘s Noah Adams, Salgado had operated a since-deleted Instagram account, @sexsurgeon, since October last year.
He posted images of surgically removed genitals, accompanied by offensive captions intended to be humorous.
In one photo, posted on Valentine’s Day, Salgado rearranged a patient’s dissected, severed penis into a heart shape and tagged it “#whatthefuckisthat.”
Salgado also used profanity and racist, homophobic statements in his photo captions.
He captioned another photo of a dildo that was surgically removed from a patient’s rectum with “could have been avoided if the transman had a real phalloplasty.” He tagged the image with the hashtag “realdicksmatter.”
A phalloplasty is the surgical construction or reconstruction of a penis.
Dr. Salgado – who appeared on an episode of TLC’s reality show I Am Jazz, provided a gender reassignment consult to the series’ star Jazz Jennings.
Salgado’s secret account was discovered when an unnamed source posted images from his account to a private phalloplasty support group on Facebook.com on Feb. 17.
Members of the support group collected 500 signatures on a petition and sent it to Salgado, his bosses, and WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), calling for accountability.
The University of Miami Health System responded promptly by terminating Salgado’s employment within two days, according to OUT magazine.
“The University of Miami does not comment on the detailed status of employees,” Salgado’s former employers told The Trans Advocate. “However, we can confirm that Dr. Christopher Salgado is no longer employed by the University of Miami. We continue to have a team of experts providing the full continuum of care for gender reassignment patients.”
Dr. Salgado is one of a dozen or so surgeons in the nation who performs the delicate and complex surgery on people diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or gender identity disorder, a condition that causes people to feel extreme distress over the genitals they were born with.
Dr. Salgado’s scheduled patients will be reassigned to Dr. Ajani Nugent at the Johns Hopkins Center for Transgender Health in Baltimore, MD.
Stock photo by Hoxton/Tom Merton
