Trans Facial Feminisation Surgery Part 5: The Communal Lie
NSFW: This series contains graphic images and descriptions of medical procedures.
This is the fifth and final article in a series about the medicalisation of my gender transition. An edition without medical images available »HERE. Links to the other articles in this series are available below. Images are by the incomparable Morgan Roberts.
Morgan arrives and sets up his equipment in my bedroom one last time.
A whole year has passed. A whole year to the day when he helped me to my feet and kindly guided me to my mark, exhausted, bruised, seeping fluids into tubes. It’s hard to think about him taking these photos, especially in the surgery. Morgan is of that particular sort who falls into his work, ceases to be himself and transforms into a conduit for what is happening in front of him.
He has come as close to experiencing the hurt and difficulty of transition, as close to living the experience as someone can without actually taking the hormones, having the surgery and grappling with the dysphoria. My gratitude to him is immense and he deserves as much recognition in this as anyone.
All cosmetic surgery is gender affirming surgery
The plaintive cry that “trans people are just like cisgendered people” is commonplace. Perhaps it’s a testament to how radicalised I’ve become, but I cannot stomach the argument. Not because I don’t agree, but because the framing is just so damn wrong. I’m not here telling cisgendered people that I’m just like them, I’m telling cisgendered people that they are just like me, a transgender person.
My value as a person is inherent. My agency over this body is total.
Gender affirming surgeries, have existed long before the modern threat of “the dreaded transgender ideology” came bursting into the current discourse. The Kardashians with their wholly crafted faces? Elon Musk with his jawline implants and back-filled harvested follicle hairline? These are just modern expressions of the almost universal human desire to shore up one’s feelings of inadequacy around gender. Charles Atlas and his Chest Expansion System, Gustav Zander and his Vibrating Belt Machine, while a hundred years old are still “modern” compared to the ancient Egyptian rhinoplasty detailed in the 5000 year old Smith Papyrus.
Human beings modify their appearance. They always have.
Couch it in “youthfulness” and “beauty” all you want, it’s STILL “gender affirming”. No modification occurs in isolation. Every surgery, big or small, is framed against canvas of a person’s gender and our collective understanding of “what a man/woman/neither/both look like”.
We’ll never unpick the stitches of gender-based wiring in our minds.
A perfect example is the sub-nasal lip lift. Half a centimetre of flesh carved out from under my nose, bringing the philtrum gap together. Why? Because human beings have inbuilt wiring to interpret gender via this facial feature. A shorter upper lip is associated with femininity, a longer lip with masculinity. Shortening the distance between the cupid’s bow and bottom of my nose tricks the eye, makes more of the upper lip protrude to see fuller, itself another feature we associate with how women are supposed to look.
It clearly works. My mouth looks more feminine. As do the mouths of the thousands of cisgendered women who undergo this surgery every year. It is not a magic bullet to transform a face but just one of a thousand tiny levers to shift the understanding of the casual viewer in the visual story-telling that is “me”... This is a woman, unconventional as she may be, she’s still a woman.
There are a host of other procedures that do the same.
Jawline, brow ridge and tracheal shaving. Laser and light treatments for the graduations of colour, how much pink, how much blue in the cheeks and chin. Eyelifts to raise the brow off the ridgeline. Lip implants, cheek implants. All of it is designed to work in concert so you don’t notice the math being done inside your mind. You just see the person and recognise what they are.
Despite the visceral nature of the images, this isn’t some horror being performed on me. It is the same thing that cisgendered folks have been doing this whole time. The difference is that transgender people have no choice but to be honest about it.
Vandalising a Body, Ransacking a Face
The days and weeks stretched into months. The massaging of fluids under the surface, feeling them squirt from one pocket to the next. Ointment and steroid injections on scars to reduce the keloid puff and pucker. The slow, imperfect reconnection of nerves and the lingering ache under the surface. As good as this looks there are still things that remind me every day that someone gently, carefully removed my face and reattached it.
The knots of anchoring sutures in my neck, just below my jawline, are gritty under my fingertips. The nerve below my earlobe, when touched tingles in the top of my ear like a phantom finger is tickling the curve of cartilage.
None of this matters to me now, because I’m certain that I’ve not vandalised this body.
Each set of photos that morgan took confirmed something.
The day before and after, 7 days, 24 days, 54 days, 365 days… each set spoke directly to the fear that I had way back in 2023 when I left the house on the morning of my liposuction. That was the first surgical procedure in the process of reshaping my physical form and at the time I was terrified I was ransacking a perfectly serviceable body for some unattainable dream.
These images prove something to me because in every one I can see “her”.
That elusive, ephemeral woman that I was supposed to look like? The one who occasionally blinked into view in the mirror and then just as quickly was gone? This surgery won’t change how the world perceives me, but now I get to look in the mirror and see her any time I wish. I no longer have to wait for a glimpse in the mad dash to get out the door or when I’m hastily throwing on make-up.
I got the surgery so I could see her every day, but I documented it for an entirely different reason.
The Lie They Tell and The Line I’ve Drawn
The procedure I had is pure “rich middle-aged lady facelift” territory. The stereotype of the wealthy elite aging with grace? All those celebrities in their 50’s who look fundamentally unchanged since their 30’s?
This is the surgery they lie about having.
The rich and privileged get to disappear for months and re-enter the world looking refreshed and renewed. “Oh, I was meditating at a mountain retreat. I only ate raw food and drank water from a natural spring.” As if their virtuous, monastic disconnect from the world magically made them look younger and more beautiful?
Bullshit.
All those ageless elite and their effortless beauty? All those media outlets refusing to draw attention to the fact the movie star looks unrecognisable on the red carpet of their own film? The public existence of transitioning bodies reveals a truth of the world and it’s one of the many ways trans and gender-non-conforming people are dangerous.
It’s stories like mine that reveal the pain and indignity of it, the fragile frailty of it, the sheer vulnerability and inherent self-indulgence of it. Transgender people know what you did. You spent three months holed up in your estate, battered and bruised, drains pulling creamy-red fluid from your inflated face while you struggled to shit through the constipated fog of prescription painkillers. You lay in your bed, attended by staff, hoping that the artful dissection and reassembly of your face would seamlessly heal.
Our visible, unashamed transitions pull back the curtain on the “communal lie” that beauty is the purview of the virtuous. When some obnoxious asshole like me, some terrifying “abomination” can just pay to be pretty, it sure takes the shine off the apple for all of those folks who’ve been pretending it was clean living and good morality that blessed them.
But transgender people don’t get the benefit of the “communal lie”.
In the first of this series I explained the “block of stone”, the myth that mystifies and venerates and allows artists to hide their self-indulgence in the trappings of “artistic worthiness”. Don’t worry, I’m going to get all noble on you at the end and claim that this wasn’t a “vanity project” in the truest sense of the term. Without hesitation I can say that I documented this process, packaged it up and put it into the world because I wanted you to see how fucking badass I am.
Sorry, not sorry for the arrogance.
I’ve objectively earnt the right to aggrandize after such vulnerability.
Self-indulgence aside, at the beginning I explained how I wished to demystify and centre the astounding craft of the surgical team. The work they do is both glorious and deeply unsettling to witness. That’s why I’ve done this. I wanted this to make you uncomfortable, I wanted to make you feel uneasy with the reality of this.
Transgender people don’t have the luxury to do this in private; we have to do this under scrutiny of media and politicians and church leaders. At some point we stopped being flesh and blood and became “topic of debate”, a “ideology”, a problem to be legislated out of existence.
You wanna see how much I am still flesh and blood? Here. Look at it.
The fear, the pain, the deep ache inside my face; this experience is burned into my mind as much as it is etched into my skin like the scars hiding in my hairline. You may think it unkind of me to inflict these words and images on you, but in my mind, there’s no better way to highlight that folks like me are not some abstract concept. We are still people and we are routinely stripped of our dignity and forced to be vulnerable in ways that cisgender people would never accept.
So, this is where I decided to draw my line.
If I don’t get to pretend, like so many Hollywood starlets, like so many “alpha males”, that my face just magically changed one day, if trans folks don’t get the benefit of the communal lie that cisgendered people get, then I don’t think they should have the benefit of it either.
–S
The images and text published here are an individual case do not constitute a testimonial or medical advice. Any surgical or invasive procedure carries risks. Before commencing your surgical journey, please seek medical advice from an appropriately qualified health practitioner.
More in this series…
“I paid to have my face cut off and reattached”:
Facial Feminisation, Liposuction and the Hope of Change.
Published while undergoing facial feminisation surgery in 2024, this article describes liposuction and waistline crafting, my first transition surgery.
Trans Facial Feminisation Surgery Part 1: The Block of Immovable Stone
Unwrapping the aftermath, Nicholas Cage and the lies we tell ourselves.
Trans Facial Feminisation Surgery Part 2: Veil of Dignity and Vanity
Not holding back, Disney animators and winking out of existence.
Trans Facial Feminisation Surgery Part 3: Sleeping Beauty in a Medical Waste Bag
Disassembling my face and addressing the excess.
Trans Facial Feminisation Surgery Part 4: Running the Gauntlet of Womanhood
Missives from the belly of a ship and a clowns handkerchief.
Great stuff! And thank you for your comment on my comment t'other day (can't find it now to reply). I just shared this series with a friend who's about to publish her own multimedia account, here on TERF island
Bravo! This was a wonderfully written series and you are certainly a badass. I forced myself to look at the end. Not easy. But, understanding the reality of your story, of thousands of other trans people like you, makes me understand myself even more. It's ok that I was afraid for so long as there is good right to be. Fear is one thing however and being myself, truly unabashedly is the only way I can live the rest of my life.