I am a plastic surgeon who rebuilds faces after car accidents, helps cancer patients breathe, and restores infants’ ability to eat and smile. Yet what draws the most notice is my work transforming masculine features into feminine ones, and vice versa.
I am an outsider to the LGBTQIA+ community. I grew up in a conservative household in which discussions on sex and gender were taboo. But in residency, I saw patients in clinic every Monday with my attending, a cisgender, white, heterosexual male at least 60 years old, who had been providing surgical gender-affirming care for over 25 years. I saw how vulnerable the patients were, trapped in their bodies. I felt the weight they woke up with every day, trying to blend into the surrounding world of instantaneous judgements. And I saw the life-changing impact that surgery had.
Now as an attending, I perform gender-affirming surgeries that I know have a transformative impact on patients, enabling them to do basic things we all take for granted like looking at yourself in the mirror and showering with the lights on.
This care has always fallen in line with the foundational principles of surgery designed to honor honest scientific inquiry and respect the human condition.
