this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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How does one find a surgeon for FFS? (pawb.social)
submitted 7 months ago by Fluffy_Doggy_DG@pawb.social to c/mtf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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Apparently it’s been over a month and a half since we reached internal consensus on this, but I still haven’t made any progress on this subject other than asking at a local support group: Unfortunately no-one there seems to care much about this subject (only SFS/SRS for some reason), so it wasn’t much help.

What I want to know is: How do you actually find a surgeon to perform this kind of procedure? And how do you decide if it turns out there are multiple practical options? Is it worth leaving the region to go by plane (post-surgery train ride sounds a lot nicer than flying…)?

Details: We’re located in the EU and the public health insurance carriers don’t cover it.* We have the money to pay for this kind of procedure privately, but it would be better not to put too much stress on our savings as our income isn’t that great. This also means there is no list of “in network” surgeons (that’s a USian concept, I think?) to consult. We’ve been on HRT for over a year and a half, still weigh less than 90kgs and are AMAB and unlikely to be inter (that checks all the usual boxes, I think).

Any resources or personal stories would be appreciated as well.

* In fact, they were apparently recently sued into at least covering facial lasing, but everything trans-related is a default-no with public insurance unless overruled in court. In theory one could perform the procedure in Denmark (where it is covered), get the SS2 form rejected by the public health insurance around here, then spend the next couple of years in court with them though.

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[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Maybe it's faux-pas to post a reddit link on lemmy, but here's a list of EU FFS surgeons: https://old.reddit.com/r/TransSurgeriesWiki/wiki/ffs/europe

[–] SquishedFly@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Holy shit, how didn't I know this exists? This is an amazing recourse. Thank you so much for this

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

hey no worries - the trans community on reddit is pretty big and strong, so whenever I'm stuck on something like this I search with site:reddit.com in ddg.gg and it usually gets me something helpful 😆 I just got lucky in this case, glad I was able to help ❤️

I wish you luck, I'm really so sorry to hear about the EU's ridiculous transphobic policies.

[–] Fluffy_Doggy_DG@pawb.social 2 points 7 months ago

I wish you luck, I’m really so sorry to hear about the EU’s ridiculous transphobic policies.

Thanks! Although I wanted to note (even if it might be fine print to many) that it isn't the EU or the public health insurance providers being transphobic: this really is on the state government refusing to regulate anything for who-knows-how-long. Other EU member states (ie: Denmark) apparently do this a lot better. (The health insurance providers could definitely be nicer about it too, but they do have a mandate to not just hand out money to anyone without legal basis.)

[–] KillingAndKindess@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

When the blackout happened and looked as though this particular sub was going to go dark permanently I was so sad. Glad to see its back up, and I hope the information there is preserved in some way

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 7 months ago

yes, Reddit has a surprising amount of useful information; I wish there were a project like Wikipedia (or to a lesser-extent, stackoverflow) that organized and made this kind of information and community wisdom an accessible and well-maintained Commons for anyone to benefit from (like online community as a long-term humanist project, haha)

[–] Fluffy_Doggy_DG@pawb.social 1 points 7 months ago

That helped, I think! There was this big blockade on how to even get started (see opening post) and having a list of concrete options to evaluate actually made this go from an abstract thing to something actionable. (In hindsight, I should have been able to find this myself, but I just never considered searching like that, even though I regularily do research on other topics.)

In any case, I’ve one booked one consultation with the trusted-but-expensive baseline for us so far. We’ll see how it goes.

In the mean time, while doing somewhat related health research I’ve also stumbled on the fact that, there might by local options available for the nasal surgery in the city we live in. Since it generally seems to recommended to split FFS into multiple parts, doing the nose part first with a local nasal surgeon* and having a more specialized FFS surgeon harmonize the remaining face abroad later on might be an interesting option.

If anyone has any specific recommendations those would still be appreciated!

* Their adverts are definitely aimed at cis-women, but looking at their published before-after pictures (they have some!) they might as well been trans as far their pre-surgury nose shapes are concerned, so I doubt there is any difference.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm in Australia, and when I got FFS, there were no Australian options, so I had to go out of the country. Ultimately, what decided me was a combination of speaking directly with people who had used the surgeons I was looking at, and speaking the surgeon/surgeons team.

Seeing their results and hearing their experiences gave me the assurance I needed to commit to handing money over to a surgeon on another continent

[–] Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Hi Ada, I'm in Australia too, any chance you could DM the name of your surgeon or clinic? I've been trying to research options but it's hard to find Australia specific recommendations

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I went with Dr Javier Rossi in Argentina in 2019. It was all organised through t-change. I'll try and answer questions publicly so others can see them too, but if you've got anything specific you'd like to ask not in the public eye, feel free to drop me a DM or hit me up on Matrix if you use it

[–] Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 7 months ago

Fantastic! Thanks so much!