Because I do not like the scars that result from double-incision and prefer not to have them myself, I have spent most of my time and energy focusing on top-surgery options that do not involve much scarring. Just recently, I was discussing surgery options with an ftm friend and his girlfriend. When she asked why “keyhole” surgery–one of the ones I’ve been contemplating–was called “keyhole,” my friend answered that it could be because the incisions were so small. And I said, “As opposed to double-incision, where they just throw the doors open!” My friend gently explained that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to say stuff like that in front of someone who had undergone that procedure, like for instance him.
He was absolutely right. That was a deeply insensitive thing to say. He really doesn’t need to hear that from me or anyone. I won’t want any comments on sagging leftover tissue or overlarge nipples after I’m done.
When transgendered people talk about transition, the general rule of order is to make personal statements, and to keep the language as respectful and neutral as possible. It’s difficult to remember this at times, since most of us are negotiating some very strong, if subjective, dysphoria, and a lot of us are very eager for whatever results we’re chasing. But the pre-op genitalia some other guy can’t live with is the vagina I don’t want to live without. The metaoidioplasty I think of as inadequate to my needs is perfectly satisfactory to some other guy. The pregnancy that one guy could never endure is the pregnancy another guy can’t wait for. And the phalloplasty that one guy sees as a “frankendick”* is another guy’s dream come true.
All of the possible decisions, from whether to undergo phalloplasty to whether to transition at all, are hateful to some people and necessary to others. If it’s personal, keep it personal. If it’s unkind or humiliating, keep it to yourself. We hear plenty of that kind of transsexual body-hatred from outsiders, and most of us will be fighting its echoes all our lives. We don’t need to encounter it in supportive or private spaces.
(This is also why I’m extremely leery of discussing my bottom-surgery preferences among people who are not transsexual. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that the current options for ftms are inadequate in some objective, overarching sense simply because I’ve opted out of them. For a lot of ftms, they work, they satisfy, they complete. You can have orgasms with them and all kinds of good stuff. Mainstream press articles tend to repeat uncritically the idea that transmen just don’t get good dicks. While it’s true that some guys reject them and some guys settle, it’s neither respectful nor accurate to treat post-op transmale genitalia as a crap knockoff of the real thing. And it’s just plain sexist to argue that transguys can’t have penises, and that’s that.)
Anyhoo, I opened up the paper yesterday morning and saw this, and now I am, what’s the word, enraged. All it took was a couple of too-too-clever references to character actors in the wrong context.
But nothing really worked. A transsexual who decided late in life to transition to female gender, Roberts went to San Francisco plastic surgeon Douglas Ousterhout last fall and requested a new face. She wanted to “pass,” which in her case meant altering a Governator jaw, a large nose and a low, protruding brow line that “made me feel about as feminine as one of the females in ‘Planet of the Apes.’
“I felt like I could not shift over to a full-time gender position until my face — my identity — was correct,” explains Roberts. The 59-year-old Seattle musician and retired business executive is 6 feet tall and has a 25-year-old son. He found out about Ousterhout’s innovative facial feminization surgery online and decided to take the leap. The results, five months later, are dramatic: instead of the receding hairline, lantern jaw and (actor) Geoffrey Rush profile, Roberts is a perfectly plausible female.
Fuck you, Edward Guthmann. Look, it’s true that the transwomen you interview in this article describe their preferences in rather colorful terms, and it’s true that their phrasing is not exactly respectful, but you? Can shut the fuck up. Yes, you, Edward Guthmann, who has never been mocked in any newspaper article as an utter failure at being Edward Guthmann.
You did a modicum of research on facial feminization surgery; you know that it costs money:
For $22,000 to $40,000 — roughly twice the cost of sexual reassignment surgery — Ousterhout’s patients undergo as much as 10 1/2 hours of surgery. They remain in the hospital two days after surgery, then transfer to the Cocoon House, a bed-and-breakfast facility run by two nurses in Noe Valley, for eight days of convalescence.
Do I need to tell you that that kind of price tag means that facial feminization surgery is completely out of reach for a great many transwomen? Do I need to tell you that some of them might yet desire it? Do I need to tell you that some of them might reject it for a variety of reasons? Do I need to tell you that most of them, however they feel about their faces, would probably like to be seen as female without having to satisfy Edward Guthmann’s definition of plausibility? Do I need to tell you that some of them might also have to listen to the same verbal abuse on which you riff with such virtuosity? Do I need to tell you that some of them might be reading this very article? Do I need to remind you that the “Linebacker in a Dress” stereotype is so firmly embedded in the mainstream consciousness that it hardly requires paragraph after paragraph of remedial ridicule to bring it to glowing life in the minds of your readers?
Apparently so!
“I also don’t like the width of my nose,” Windsor adds. In fact, it’s as masculine and unavoidable as Adrien Brody’s. The surgery will also lift her upper lip closer to her nose, allowing for a more feminine smile. It’s a subtle difference, Ousterhout says, but men have a vertically longer upper lip than women. It’s not noticeable when they smile, but when a man’s lips are parted a few millimeters, the upper teeth are hidden. Ousterhout shortens the upper lip by making an incision immediately beneath the sill of the nose.
Aw, Eddie, you charmer, that’s so sweet! I wonder if she knew what you were gonna say about her face before she opened up yesterday’s paper.
And of course there are the truly pathetic transwomen who are just fucked, regardless:
She’s got a point: Think of Roberta Muldoon, the professional football player-turned-lady played by John Lithgow in “The World According to Garp.” Or Roy “Ruth” Applewood, a Midwestern husband and dad, played by the bearish Tom Wilkinson, who shocks his family by coming out as transgender in the cable drama “Normal.”
Oh, but there’s more. Any woman brought up on a steady diet of teen magazines knows what comes after the excoriation of an abnormal body:
Not everyone agrees that FFS is desirable for transitioning transsexuals. San Francisco entertainer Veronica Klaus had genital reassignment surgery and breast augmentation but decided against facial surgery. “While I think it can be an important step in realizing one’s potential, it’s more important that one’s self-esteem come first from the inside.”
We mustn’t forget to mention self-esteem! It’d be like leaving the sprig of parsley off of the plate of saltimboca! Lip-service to inner beauty–you know, like the kind all the women you just insulted will have regardless of whether or not they’ve made their bodies acceptable to you or anyone else?
*This is a slur, so much so that I share it with reservations.