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Transgender News

My Facial Feminisation Surgery

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Smoakie Bulle Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve 2000, six months or so ago, my friends and myself were invited into a house across the road from where I live to join a party. It was one of those only- on-New-Year’s-Eve-with-a-skinful-occasions, and when I went in I was treated as the bloke across the road in a frock. It was he and him without cease – they just saw me as male, unbelievably, and I began this year deep in yet more of those unending tears back at my flat. Will this never end, I said, is there no way out of this? After all I have done, after living well as a woman for all this time, rarely read, or so I thought, after Sex Reassignment Surgery, after thousands of little white oestrogen pills, with a skin like a baby, a girl at last and happy and well in my world? After all I’ve been through, and it means nothing?

Right, I said to my partner, gritting my teeth yet again, this is it. I’ve had enough, I won’t live with this. I’m going to have my face fixed this year no matter what. You see, I knew what it was these people were seeing, what it was in me that made them see the old maleness; it was in the structures of the bones of my face, and this is what I decided had to be changed. In for a penny, in for a pound, that’s my way. I forgot how to spell kompromize a long time ago. Why stop before the end? Why not the best?

I stumbled on the Anne Lawrence website (annelawrence.com/twr) years ago, and with its links it has led me through many a maze, and it was here that I learned of Facial Feminization Surgery (FFS). Go and look for yourself, and what you will find is a revelation. Once you see it, it’s obvious, and male and female faces are never the same again. It all comes down to hormones again, that demon testosterone and the ravages it had on our bodies and minds.

In late adolescence, boys turn into young men. I’ve watched this happen to my son, who is now eighteen. The bones change, and what makes a man a man, and brings a woman like myself a life behind a mask, is the creation of, from the top down;

The brow ridge, and brow bossing. For me, the most significant of all. Like many results of the work of testosterone, my browridge formed almost a hood over my eyes. The line of the forehead in profile came down, then out just before the eyes, then right in. Oestrogen does not make this happen, and the brow in natal women remains the same as in children, where the line of the forehead comes straight down, leaving the eyes more open and unhooded. As we first look at the eyes when we meet someone, this subconscious marker of gender is highly significant.

The nose in the natal female is often smaller, narrower, less significant; the testosterone nose wider, more powerful a presence.

The prominence of the chin and the line of the jaw. This is more well-known. The female chin comes more to a point, it is rounded and is slighter in profile; it doesn’t stick out so much. The testosterone jaw is often wider, coming to strong angled points below the ears.

Of course, faces come in billions of forms, none of them the same, and masculinity and femininity shows in other ways on the face, but the main markers of maleness and femaleness are consistent. Freud said that the first point of recognition when we meet a person is that of gender; is this a male or a female? The rest of identity follows, is built on this. The subconscious indicators of gender come in the form of dress and body language, ways of moving, ways of dressing, the skin, the voice, the way we speak, the way the person feels to us; on and on. Many of these we can work at and change, but the bone structures of the face, the frame upon which the skin hangs, can only be changed by surgery, and this is what we look at first, this is what sets the tone for all that folows.

If you look on the Net, you will mostly see the work of Dr Ousterhout in San Francisco. The results of this surgery can be astonishing; craggy male faces turned into attractive women’s. For some, a life which would be unbearable becomes a joy.

No wonder so many transsexual women don’t mind what Dr Ousterhout charges; anything to get me out of this! When I contacted some of the women who had put their results up on the Internet, I was told of Ousterhout’s costs, and my heart sank. Around $28,000. Plus two trips to San Franscisco. It comes to around £20,000. A great surgeon, no doubt, but way too expensive for me.

So I looked for alternatives. This was not so easy. What I was looking for specifically was a cranio-maxillary-aesthetic surgeon with experience of transforming the transsexual face at a good price. I needed a surgeon who works with the bone structures of the face, with empathy and understanding of who and what I am, and these guys hardly come on every street corner.

Still, with determination I found one, not advertised at all, tucked off in a corner of Belgium. Dear Dr Noorman van der Dussen. I went to see him in February, loved him, and had extensive facial surgery at the Eeufeestkliniek in Antwerp on April 18th. Not bad, eh? Less than four months from New Year’s Eve and it was all done.

I had my brow ridge removed; Dr Noorman van der Dussen (all of this is his surname, let’s call him Dr NvvD) told me afterwards that he had removed about 1 centimetre of bone from over my eyes. A centimetre! Usually these things are done in millimetres. I had a lot to lose.

My nose, which was always slender, had its upturned, ski-jump end removed. My upper lip was enhanced. My chin was narrowed, taken back, the angle changed, and the jaw line altered to fit. Seven hours on the operating table; not a small thing to do.

I left the clinic the day after surgery and went to a hotel, amazingly, but it was fine. As Dr NvvD said, all you need is comfort to recover, better and cheaper in a hotel. I had two days of great discomfort, but almost no pain at all, thank God. How lovely I looked; bandages over the scalp, right round the jaw, my nose in a plastic cover taped to my face, one eye closed completely and the colour of a red fruit, the other open a crack, gorgeous colours everywhere, looking like a creature from a strange part of the universe in Star Wars.

But recovery was swift. Five days after surgery I was out in the Belgian countryside with the friend who came with me – bless you Jane, where would I be without you? – and a new transsexual friend I made in the hotel, enjoying pancakes and coffee. Avoid the tea; this is not England. I had on so much covering make-up I could hardly lift my head, and there was swelling in plenty which made me look a little odd, but I made it.

Then I was back home less than a week after surgery, feeling tired and full of anaesthetic, but not too bad. No signs of surgery at all. Incisions were made behind the hairline for the forehead, inside the mouth for the chin and jaw. It was like a miracle had happened.

It took a few weeks for the whole thing to settle in properly, but it did, and now I am fine. But the test of the pudding is in the eating, and the test of FFS is not only in the looking, but in how I feel, the most important thing of all. And what I have to tell you is that I am very happy. It’s made all the difference in the world. When my friends look at me, they still see Persia. It’s not as if I have another face; what’s happened is that my own face has been softened and opened. It has been feminized. The work is subtle and very well done, integral, looking so natural that many people have no idea anything has been done at all. You are looking well, Persia, they say, not knowing what they are seeing.

The greatest effect can be seen in profile. All the prominent angles of my face have been removed. The overhanging brow, the ski-jump nose, the angular chin, all replaced with softness. I love it. I now have none of the indicators of the male on my face. I have always felt that the transsexual transition was, for me, a restoration of my own true being, and now I have even restored my own face. It is no longer the face of a brother I never had.

And I feel completely relaxed now. I am seen as a woman now, almost completely, except for on one of those bad days when nothing goes well. I am what I am, a transsexual woman, and there will always be someone somewhere who knows. But so little, so rarely that I no longer care.

The feelings of this cannot be expressed better than in the words of anon (name witheld by request), who underwent FFS at the hands of Dr. DouglasOusterhout in San Francisco, but the same is true of Dr Noorman van der Dussen, and anon expresses my own feelings with a beauty I cannot hope to match.

” When I went out before my surgery, no amount of radiated joy and peace would have kept me from being perceived oddly by some. I’m not talking about passing here, I’m talking about how, as a human being, people saw me. I want people to see *me* clearly, not through the filter of doubt about who I might be. Even as happy and upbeat as I was prior to surgery with Doug, the lines and curves in my face that didn’t belong to me abraded my confidence, were as wrong as a lock of hair that stands away from your scalp that no amount of coaxing can keep down.

I am sure that if Doug’s work did not exist, I would have made the best of it, but I suspect that as much happiness as I would have mined out of life, the difference between who I am and who my face said I was would have eaten away at me. Who knows.

Results aside, it allows me to not simply move through the world and society — the best I could hope for beforehand — but to actively embrace it, to find a peace within myself, or the possibility for it, that others see and perceive. It is a wonderful resonant cycle as the relaxed comfort in my own skin radiates from me to others, who in turn sense my centeredness and reflect happiness back at me.

It’s how I feel too. Undergoing this surgery has let me cross the line into my own womanhood in a way I could not quite manage before, no matter how well I did, how good I looked, and even then I could go to the women only sessions at the swimming pool and feel almost at ease. Now I am completely relaxed, found myself chatting to other women in the showers while we waited for one to be free the other day without me noticing what I was doing – an amazing feat of transformation when I think back to my early days.

There is a form of trasngendered political correctness in the USA these days which states that we should be accepted as we are, no matter how we are, this being our truth, this being one form of human existence the world needs to accept as another normalcy. We should be proud of who we are, no matter how we look.

Very good, but my own truth is that I am just a simple girl from Liverpool who wants to live without problem in this world; more than that, to live here with joy. I was like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz – but I wanted to come home even more than she did. And I’ve made it, I’m back in Kansas, back in Brighton actually, just living in the world but now with restored exquisite normalcy. I am a very happy and fulfilled person, and my life is opening like a flower. What I have done, despite having no money to speak of, you can do too. Go for it.

The cost of the surgery with Dr Noorman van der Dussen, by the way, came to around £6,500. Not cheap, but a bargain in British or U.S. surgical terms. About a third of the cost here, if you could find the surgeon, and I don’t think he or she exists. I had SRS in Belgium too, under the kind knife of Dr. Seghers, a complete coincidence, so I know about Belgian medicine. It’s very good indeed, recommended.

By Persia West June 2001

Gender Trust – 2003, This information sheet is distributed by the Gender Trust and is intended as a basis for information only. The Gender Trust does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of any information contained in this sheet.

 

Transgender News

Rich Man, Poor Man, Transsexual Woman

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Summer 1955 and this child’s fate has already been determined by nature.

A child giggles whilst drinking the bath water from an egg cup. It is 1955 and not long since the national press have reported the story of a Spitfire pilot and racing driver who has “become” a woman through what we now call Gender Reassignment Treatment.

The child’s parents have registered and christened her as a boy. How is anyone to know any different? Within three years “he” will know otherwise though … and the little girl inside will have learned enough about life already not to mention her profound self knowledge to anyone.

In years to come she will learn that people who seek the treatment to release them from this silent hell are labelled as freaks and get hounded by the press. They are shunned by their families and friends. They are treated with less respect than murderers and rapists. Anything they receive from medical specialists or authority is to be regarded as a grudging and contemptuous concession which they don’t really deserve. Not surprisingly, she will seek to bury her terrifying self knowledge deep within herself.

As enlightenment gradually dawns on society, sometime in her thirties, she will wince though when she sees women like her described as having been “born a man”.

A man? Look again at the photograph. You could no more call the child a “man”, than you could label them a “Computer Consultant”, “Conservative” or “Rights Campaigner”. Yet all of these labels are a part of her development potential, just as her innate femininity means she will not rest until she finds her true self-expression within society.

So, eventually, she will come to the agonising choice which confronts all transsexual people in the end … made worse for having deferred it until mid life. She will have to decide how to deal with the partner and family she acquired whilst trying to be what everyone expected of her. She will have to put her career on the line. She will lose her home and tens of thousands of pounds through divorce. She will lose some of her friends. For a while she will wonder if she deserves to keep her own self respect. Yet the choice is between that and suicide. For a life which is a perpetual lie … a life which gets more painful with every passing day of the soul’s denial … is no life at all.

Make believe? No. Increasing research evidence indicates that everything which transsexual people have ever reported about their mysterious juxtaposition of psychological gender and physical sex is true. The more science is inclined to look, the more it finds to substantiate the discovery that children like the little “boy” in the picture above really did already have the brain of a little girl.

Nobody can be blamed for assuming this little girl was a boy. If we have to have a basis for distinguishing how we’re going to differentiate the type of upbringing we’re to give our children then the appearance of their genitals is no more and no less arbitrary than the colour of their skin or the country they were born in. What matters, however, is how we respond when the child is old enough to turn round and say that we got it wrong in their case.

It helps, of course, to be sophisticated enough to be able to accept such an assertion with the respect it deserves. If society attaches such importance to gender then it’s hardly a trivial thing when you know you’ve been dragooned into the wrong one. Transsexuals need help, not hindrance, if they are to manage a transition which affects every single way in which they relate to the world around them.

More than that, however, a compassionate and sensible society will recognise that once such a change has occurred then there is absolutely no benefit to anyone in making it anything less than a 100% change. Society only has two social genders to choose from. Man and Woman. To cripple a man with a legal status which regards him as a woman, or to say that a woman cannot marry a man because of her long-since-removed birth deformity is to erect a deliberate barrier to the otherwise successful functioning of that individual. It is, in short, like breaking a man’s leg because you don’t want to accept that he can walk.

And that is all that we in Press for Change seek from British society. The right to walk. To stand on our own two feet after being forced to crawl for almost thirty years. It’s not a lot, is it?

This information sheet is compiled from an article by Press for Change, the organisation which campaigns for rights for transsexual people. To find out more about Press For Change visit their website at pfc.org.uk or write to them at:- Press For Change, BM Network, London WC1N 3XX

By Christine Burns, April 1997

Gender Trust – 2003, This information sheet is distributed by the Gender Trust and is intended as a basis for information only. The Gender Trust does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of any information contained in this sheet.

Transgender News

My Teenage Son Wants to be a Woman

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Beth Thomas always knew her son Adam was different she just couldn’t put her finger on it. At times she grew despondent at his mood swings. Adam was spending more and more time alone in his bedroom and when Beth asked what was wrong he wouldn’t answer properly.

“I’d always wondered if Adam was gay,” says Beth, 49, an office manager from Southend, Essex. “Even when he was growing up he’d always choose girls’ clothes instead of boys’ and play with the girls at school. I thought it was just a matter of time before he told me.”

But a few years later, when Adam was 18, he dropped a bombshell. He wasn’t gay but he wanted to change sex.

“I knew telling Mum would be one of the hardest things I’d ever have to do,” says Adam who’s now living as Zoe. “She’d always been quite open-minded but I knew telling her I wanted a sex change was going to be difficult. It would be hard for anyone to deal with.”

Five years earlier, Adam had started to feel uncomfortable about his identity and sank into a deep depression.

“It didn’t help that I was being bullied at school,” explains Zoe, 19. “I simply didn’t want to do any of the things other boys did like play football, fight and so on. I even took ballet lessons for a while. I’d get called a poof and be pushed around. I felt suicidal”

But when puberty hit, things got worse. “I started growing facial hair and it simply didn’t feel right,” adds Zoe. “I felt disgusted by it. I developed a sex drive too and that was very confusing. I wondered if I was gay but I fancied girls, though I felt more like them than a teenage boy.”

Adam left school at 16 to take a course in computing. There he found an outlet for his frustrations and made some friends. “There were boys at college who experimented with makeup.” recalls Zoe. “So I could wear lipstick and dress in sarongs without other students thinking I was strange.”

It was six months later that Adam discovered why he was feeling the way he was.

Surfing the Internet one night in July 1999 he came across the word ‘transsexual‘.

He logged on to the website and everything began to make sense. “There were stories about women trapped in men’s bodies,” recalls Zoe. “I identified with them strongly and nearly shouted out that’s me! Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone. I was frightened about the future but the overwhelming feeling was one of relief.”

Adam discovered there were operations and hormone treatments available for transsexuals to help them cope with their feelings.

“Almost immediately I knew I was really a girl,” says Zoe. “I asked Mum what she would have called me if I’d been born a girl. She said Zoe and that’s what I decided to call my alter ego my real self.”

Adam confided in friends first of all. “My closest friend Michelle said, ‘Oh, cool! If that will make you happy,'” remembers Zoe. “My other friends, Alex and Mike, didn’t seem shocked at all. The only comment they made was at Christmas when Alex said he didn’t know what to get me as he’d never bought anything for a girl before.”

Adam, an only child who’s had no contact with his father since his parents split up five years ago, was still petrified about telling his mum. It wasn’t until Christmas Eve 1999 that the truth came out.

“I came home and found him wearing one of my Chinese dresses,” recalls Beth. “I was stunned and asked him what he was doing. He burst into tears, sat down and hid his face. He told me he wanted a sex change. I told him he was messed up. I didn’t think he could be serious. The only transsexual I knew was Hayley in Coronation Street. He was far too young to be making decisions like this. Looking back I feel awful about the way I reacted.”

Over the next six months, Adam and Beth often rowed about his identity crisis.

“She kept saying it was stupid.” says Zoe, who works for an Internet company. “I tried to explain that I was really Zoe but she wouldn’t listen.”

Beth tried desperately to come to terms with her son’s feelings. She began surfing the Net for more information and also phoning helplines.

“I spoke to other transsexuals and realised they were ordinary, nice people,” she says. “I discovered it was a medical condition, diagnosed from psychiatric assessment, not a lifestyle choice or perversion.

“I suddenly understood why Adam had been behaving the way he had and that having a sex change might finally make him happy.

“I spoke to my GP and he said it was a good thing that Adam had made the decision so young, as it would save him years of anguish having to live as a man.

“I’ve found the fact that I’ll never have grandchildren very hard to deal with. But I’ve learnt to accept it. If things had carried on the way they were, then my son may have committed suicide and I’d have lost him altogether.”

One day last summer, Beth came home with a surprise. She held out her hand and gave Adam a keyring with the name ‘Zoe’ on it.

“I hugged him and told him I’d support him,” she says. “I knew he was determined to go through with it. I told him I wanted to meet Zoe, to see my son dressed as a girl.”

A few days later Beth took Zoe on a shopping spree to buy skirts and tops. “When he put on the clothes I was a bit shocked,” says Beth. “But the striking thing was how his personality changed. He was like a kid in a sweet shop. I could see he was so much happier being Zoe.”

Zoe discovered help on the Internet and visited a psychologist in London. He was diagnosed as transsexual and on his very first visit in August last year he was prescribed a course of female hormones.

“It can help to have the operation earlier rather than later,” says Dr Russell Reid, consultant psychiatrist specialising in gender identity, who’s treating Zoe.

“One in every 10 coming to see me is now under 20. For many young people with a crisis about their gender identity it can lead to confusion and hold them back. Having the operation can help them get on with the rest of their life.”

“Since I’ve been taking the hormones my skin is softer and people tell me my figure is much more feminine,” says Zoe. “I’ve even started to develop breasts. I’m a lot calmer but I find myself getting much more emotional, especially at the end of soppy films!

“When it comes to relationships I think of myself as a bisexual female and most people I mix with are transsexuals or very open-minded, so I don’t think I’ll have many problems.”

Adam began living as Zoe 24 hours a day.

“When I told my boss, my stomach was churning,” says Zoe. “But he was really understanding. I wore I women’s clothes to work and sent an e-mail to everyone asking if they’d call me Zoe. I’m sure there was gossip but everyone has been great.”

Beth knew she’d have to tell her friends. “Not one of them batted an eyelid:” says Beth. “They were just intrigued.”

Zoe is now saving for the private £9,000 operation which she plans to have next year. The surgery, which takes four hours, involves cutting the penis and inverting it to construct a vagina. Before then Zoe has to live as a woman for 12 months.

“Mum has gone from one extreme to the other,” says Zoe. “She wants me to be really girlie. But I just like to be natural and wear denim skirts, a blouse and not much make-up.”

Beth has surprised herself at her change of attitude.

“I genuinely think it’s for the best,” she says. “Zoe is a much happier person than Adam ever was. Adam had difficulties growing up and was a very difficult child. Zoe is much more happy-go-lucky. There was a period when I felt like I was in mourning for the son I’d lost. A little bit of my heart still misses him. But now I think of it as losing a son but gaining a daughter. And Zoe is a lovely daughter too!”

by Chris Morris
From Woman
19 February 2001, mermaids.freeuk.com/woman2.html