Malcolm MacDonald: Man Who Lost Penis Has New One That Was Built on Arm

Malcolm MacDonald, now 45, lost his penis 12 years ago and has had a replacement growing on his arm, and awaiting a transplant.

As he put it, he was “an ordinary man doing everything a normal man does”. He had a job, “a nice partner” and was living “a man’s life, bringing in the money, putting food on the table”.

The arrival of a baby, he says, disrupted things – though we later find out that the death of his father, to whom Malcolm, after time in foster care, had grown very close, killed “the happy part of me” – and he ended up on the streets and addicted to drink and drugs.

An attempt to lance an abscess himself resulted in blood poisoning.

His fingers and toes went black. So, too, did his penis. “Then I went to the toilet and it fell off,” he says, matter-of-factly.

The interviewer’s journalistic objectivity falls momentarily away. “Your … your penis fell off?” he says. “Gone,” says Malcolm, beginning to walk out of shot. “See ya.”

There is no getting away from the fact that any documentary entitled The Man With a Penis on His Arm is going to invite moments of levity.

It’s not that the narrator of Malcolm’s story, Paul McGann, doesn’t do a fine job of neutrally delivering lines such as: “No one has ever spent as long living with a penis on his arm.”

Ditto at moments such as the one where, his forearm appendage swinging free, Malcolm points out that it makes it hard to reach the back hob. It almost makes you proud to be British.

But it is, really, Malcolm’s story – which, thank God, has a happy ending. His surgeon offers him a last chance and he takes it.

His penis is now back where it belongs. He shows us the results, but it’s his brighter effect that tells us what we really need to know.