LEARNING ABOUT SURGERY

Many patients who pursue metoidioplasty and/or phalloplasty, among other types of gender-affirming surgeries, seek out information beyond what their surgical teams provide. This can be for a few different reasons. Some trans people, because of bad experiences with healthcare providers, don’t trust the information their surgical teams or other clinicians give them [1,2]. Additionally, surgeons and their teams often assume their patients already know a lot about these surgeries when they come in for a consultation (which is often true). But this means that we often have to provide a certain level of education to ourselves and our fellow community members.

Additionally, trans people have the lived, embodied experience of having undergone these surgeries, which is not an experience most gender-affirming surgeons or other clinicians have had, and so there is some information that only we can provide to each other.

Many surgical teams do provide some level of education to their patients, but the content of the education is not standardized [3] and there is little research so far on what kind of information is most helpful for patients. This means that it is important to know how to learn more about surgery on your own, so you can be well-informed before getting into the operating room. Learning about surgery also has the double benefit often of connecting you to fellow community members and peer support groups. People often find peer and community support to be helpful throughout their surgical process [3,4].

WHERE TO LEARN ABOUT SURGERY:

There are quite a few different places to learn about surgery online and in-person.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is a really common place for people to turn to in order to get information about a variety of things, including surgery.

ONLINE GROUPS

Online groups on social media, like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, are common places to learn, ask questions, and discuss topics relevant to surgery.

These spaces often require some digging to find, and vetting to be let in. Sometimes you will have to know someone who knows about the group in order to find out about it. This is why it’s beneficial to also establish relationships directly with people who have had surgery or are also interested, so they can help you find these spaces. Online groups are often necessarily locked down to preserve the privacy and safety of these spaces.

However, there are groups, like spaces on Reddit, that anyone can access. If you’re posting on or reading things on Reddit, use caution, as there is a level of anonymity that makes it difficult to verify the accuracy of some posts. Additionally, because of the public nature of spaces on Reddit, this also makes it easier for people to take the information shared there and use it for nefarious reasons.

WEBSITES

There are a number of websites which have information about metoidioplasty and phalloplasty (like this one), or more broadly about gender-affirming surgeries and the programs that offer them. Many of these are listed on the resources page. Websites can be great places to find a lot of information in one place.

Websites hosted by academic medical centers or surgical teams are going to have a bias toward only offering information that is specific to their program or center. For example, a surgeon’s website that has information about metoidioplasty may not have information about surgical options that they do not offer. So, it can be important to get your information from a variety of sources to make sure you aren’t missing anything.

BOOKS

There are a handful of books written about genital surgeries in whole, or discuss them at one point. Books can be a great way to have a longer narrative about surgery from one narrative, or a few different people’s stories in the case of an anthology, like Hung Jury. As information about genital surgeries can change quickly, books about these procedures may be out of date by the time you read them.

ZINES

There are a small handful of zines about gender-affirming surgery. You can find information about these on social media or at in-person events, like zine fairs and community conferences.

SUPPORT GROUPS

Support groups come in a few different forms,

ACADEMIC LITERATURE

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

CONFERENCES