Facial feminisation surgery: when will I stop?

Sometimes I get really tired of people calling me ‘Sir”.  Mis-gendering me.  Actually, all the time.  You have to be unobservant or rude to do it.  Why anyone in the modern world would say to someone in heels and a skirt, ‘sir’, is beyond me.  Asserting a political position.  Buying into the Trumpian notion that trans women are men, a perversion of the battle cry that trans women are women.

I get it.  I’m tall.  I have a fairly deep voice.  Do I look like a man. 50:50.  And this fits with the stats.  47% of trans women are gendered correctly, ie as women, before getting Facial Feminisation Surgery, FFS.  This is opposed to 99% of cis women who are gendered correctly.

Post-op, however, 97% of trans women are gendered correctly, as women.  An impressive jump.  But as I discussed the anguish with my therapist, and my contemplation of having facial surgery, they asked, “who are you doing it for?”  And in truth, I can’t answer that question.  The easy answer is for me.  But the only reason it is for me, is that social pressure, an intolerant climate, all conspire to misgender people like me.

That sucks.

Well, I’ve been considering it.  And if I could push a button and do it, I would.  But I’m also a cutie already.  Just not a perfect girl.  Not a perfect guy anymore either.  I am stuck in a limbo of ambiguity.

Since I can’t push a button, if I could instead know what the outcome will be.  Will my face look natural or immobile and weird?  Will I look like I’ve had surgery?  You can’t ever really tell in the before and after pictures.  There is too much chance, too much Dr. taste.  And I think that plastic surgeons have unusual ideas of beauty.

I went to see a Dr. who is quite possibly the most sought after and “best” Dr for trans facial reconstruction for male to female patients.  I don’t want much.  Advance my hairline to give it a more feminine shape, shave my Adam’s apple and maybe a little fat injections here and there, a lift.  

I showed him a picture that I have long cherished which looks exactly as I would imagine I would look had I been AFAB (assigned female at birth).  There is very little different between us, just a softness.  I said, “this is me.  This is exactly what I want to look like.  Can you do it?”

“Oh I can make you look much better than that,” the doctor boasted.

“I don’t want ‘better’, I want this.”

“But you won’t solve the mis-gendering if you don’t fully remake your face.”  He proceeded to tell me that he wanted to remove my forehead bone and make it smaller, pulling down the hairline and pulling up my eyebrows, to shave the bones above my eye sockets, to slit open my eyes to give them more of a Bambi look, to give me a nose job, to shave down my chin, to round the bones in my jaw.  6 months of hell.  Head wrapped in bandages.

I suppose I could do it if I really knew what the outcome would be.  I have spoken to several surgeons specialized in dealing with male to female transgender patients, and not one of them convinced me.  The only one who came close was in Spain, and the good Dr there told me, “you don’t really need anything.  Your features are already quite feminine.  If you were to do anything at all, you might turn the upper lip up and shorten the distance between nose and lip (this would give me that permanently pouted look).

All of the doctors are men so far.  I think they all want me to look like a fuck doll.  That isn’t quite the aesthetic I had in mind.

But in the meantime, while I grapple with this, I continue to let hormones, exercise and diet work their magic.  And they do.  I look in the mirror and can see how much I have changed.  The clock has turned back; I look a decade younger.

But I have done one thing.  I just had a hair transplant.  10 hours of semi-wakefulness while they harvested 2,600 hair follicles from the back of my head, and then planted them in my widow’s peaks and to bring my hairline forward by 1 cm.  It looks good I have to say, but this is a first step in a three part process, the next one being based on an incision and tightening to bring the hair forward.  I hope I don’t feel I have to do it.

Right now I am happy with what has been done, using the FUE method…the difference here is that they leave your long hair, only take one follicle at a time instead of an entire strip (which leaves scars).

But I am going 2 weeks without being able to touch my head, and it hurts and itches.  5,200 small holes in the scalp.  Ouch.  No wonder I have had a headache for days.  So now I heal.  It is a mini-operation really.  Nothing like getting a vagina.  But it was nice to be back to the same city, and to get all my stuff for healing out of storage, and be surrounded by all the esoterica, even food, that I left behind when I went home after bottom surgery.

I already like the new men in the mirror better.  The hair will take 6 months to a year to grow and be normal looking, but I can get a sense now that it will be great…And my greatest hope is that I can stop here.  Because I’m tired of surgery.  I just want to go out and slay.

The perverse irony is that I wanted to do FFS before bottom surgery, to save my vagina for last. But because my ex was trying to stop me, and because I didn’t want to contemplate gender reassignment surgery in a country that might vote in someone hostile to my people, I chose to focus on the sex change operation. Out of sequence doesn’t make FFS go away.