Here are some basic facts:
- method was penile inversion
- I opted for full-depth rather than a vulvoplasty
- surgery took 3 hours, though recovery took another hour
- I went under general anaesthesia and had to be intubated and put on a ventilator
- I’m currently admitted in the hospital and bed bound, discharge is scheduled for Friday
- so far pain is between 1 and 3 for me, most of the time it’s between a 0 and 1.
Ask me anything!
yes, I didn’t think my bottom dysphoria was that bad, I would have described it as moderate - but after the surgery and looking down, I felt such a huge sense of relief I broke down crying - I clearly had big feelings I was dismissing the severity of.
T~T
Tbh, I’m starting to look into it myself, though I still have +6mo before insurance will cover it. However, considering how long I’ve heard the waiting period can be, maybe now is the best time to start thinking about it and looking for surgeons.
yes, wait times can be very long and this is a surgery that requires a lot of planning. 6 months isn’t even enough time to get your hair removal finished, generally I see recommendations to have 1 whole year of electrolysis and at least 3 full cycles of hair clearance. That alone is a huge amount of work and time - I had 1 hour electrolysis appointments once a week. When you add in the typical insurance requirements to have been on hormones under the supervision of a doctor for a year and the requirement to get two independent letters from psychologists, you are looking at a lot of appointments with endocrinologists, psychologists, and eventually with the surgery team. It’s a lot - so start now if you think you might even possibly want it.
When I socially transitioned I practically promised myself I wouldn’t get a vaginoplasty, I only wanted an orchi … and that position was fully reversed after 6 months of estrogen. I wish I had taken the possibility of a vaginoplasty more seriously, and that I had started hair removal for that much earlier.
Why is the hair removal so important? Is it for removing hair that will be on the internal parts?
The scrotum and phallus skin is removed and used as a skin graft and it becomes the lining of the neovagina. You don’t want hair in your neovagina. Besides the obvious discomfort with that, there have been cases where hair in the neovagina leads to infections.
Usually surgeons now will cauterize the follicles they find on the skin graft, but that only addresses the hairs growing in that cycle - you need to have removed the hairs over many cycles so new ones don’t come in after the surgery. That’s why it’s best to have cleared all the hair with electrolysis across several cycles - ideally over an entire year (even longer than that would be better because the following year you can kill any that were missed the first year).