One man, two penises and 1000 sexual partners: the bizarre story of Triple D
Triple D is a miracle of modern science, but why Triple D?
Maybe I’m focusing on the wrong part of all this, but it’s sticking in my craw for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, it’s essentially a stage name, and that makes all the sense in the world. You wouldn’t necessarily want to out yourself to the entire world as a man with two penises. But, in this case, it’s a stage name specifically picked to talk about the condition, so what the hell is the third D for?!
Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1609, the Swiss physician Johannes Jacob Wecker wrote about the first recorded case of Diphallia, the developmental anomaly where a person is born with two penises. Cases of this condition are incredibly rare, occurring in one in every five and a half million newborns, and what’s more, it’s rarely as fun as it sounds. P
On the flip side, there are a few people for whom the condition is exactly what it sounds like. Two fully functioning penises with none of the myriad of health complications that come (stop laughing) with the condition, normally. In 2015, one of these people decided to step out into the world and talk freely about the joys and drawbacks of his condition, under the pseudonym Triple D, hence my confusion at the start of this article.
After all, Triple D does make the condition sound like something of a blessing.
At the time he went public about his condition, Triple D was a 25-year-old American man. While he kept his real identity a secret for obvious reasons, he self-published a tell-all book about his condition called Double Header: My Life With Two Penises and talked to several news outlets about his experiences with it. He started out with his experiences as a kid, which, considering that feeling insecure about one’s body is something all of us can relate to at that time, one can only imagine what he went through.
In an interview with BBC Newsbeat, he talked about getting “the talk” from his parents for the first time, saying they framed it as him being “special” and “unique”, but also that he should never “play doctor with anyone else, don’t take your pants off in front of other people.”
However, Triple D could only live in secret for so long and by the time he was 16, word began to spread around the school of his condition. He considered having one removed, but within a decade, he would begin to see the upside of his condition.
After all, it didn’t take too long to find a whole lot of people who thought his condition was pretty interesting, shall we say, and had a very particular way of showing that interest. All this to say that Triple D’s way of owning his condition was to rack up over a thousand sexual partners by the time he was 25. One hell of a schedule, I’m sure you’ll agree. In his words, he was “owning it, it was being me and accepting it and putting them to use.”
That’s right. Someone really could have called themselves Triple D and meant it.