Lost amid attempts to control the pandemic and a deluge of anti-trans legislation, the need to ensure access to gender-affirming surgery continues to be overlooked.
In January 2020, I was feeling hopeful. I’d just had a long-awaited gender-affirming surgery to masculinize my chest, and fantasized about hitting the beach topless and showing off my results at Pride. Unfortunately, my body had other plans—I struggled for two months with unforeseen healing complications and had to schedule a revision surgery to help smooth out the uneven areas of my chest and clean up the thick, uncomfortable scarring I’d developed.
“I want you to be happy with your chest,” she told me, “but we’re not scheduling any surgeries and I have no idea when we’ll be able to get you in.” I’m finally recovering from that second surgery—more than a year and a half later. Between my surgeon’s backlog of desperate patients, medical staff shortages, and convincing Medicaid that a second surgery was, in fact, medically necessary and not simply “cosmetic,” it took six months just to get a date on the books.
Many of my friends have not been so lucky. For weeks, my social media feeds were filled with desperate people whose surgeries have been canceled and don’t know when they can expect to be rescheduled. One friend keeps receiving messages that their initial surgical consult is being moved back; another was told it would probably be a year or two before they could even set an appointment with a surgeon to discuss the procedure.