A Letter to My Top Surgeon, Five Years Later

It’s been almost three years since I stopped the hormones, the hiding, the desperate attempts at transfiguration that I had been pursuing since I was a teenager. I was physically ill, weathered, swollen, and askew from the cross-sex hormones and your haphazard surgery. The years of growing illness under the encouragement of affirming doctors had taken their toll on my body and mind. Somehow, any illness or injury attributed to the pursuit of transition was an honor that I should be grateful for, or proof of my idiocy for trusting an understudied science enough to be a lab rat.

My transmasc friends and I jokingly called ourselves “guinea pigs” when we had a symptom or side effect that we were never warned about and couldn’t explain. It twists the knife in my gut to know how much it wasn’t a joke at all. When I woke from the delusion, I didn’t believe I would ever have a chance to know what I could have looked like- what I should have looked like- had I not run to the arms of doctors who would affirm anything for their cut of the insurance payout.

You were one such doctor, with a reputation for not asking questions and specializing in flattening the chests of traumatized women and girls. You didn’t have any interest in medically necessary mastectomies- only the fashionable kind. The kind that people pay out of pocket for if they fall short of the requirements for the lucrative government care offered in your state. Trans care was the big money, you explained, and you didn’t need to offer anything else. Your eagerness to deliver results to anyone who asked for surgery provided a kind of popularity that masked your significant shortcomings, such as your refusal to give appropriate pain medications or address post-op complications.

To this day, there are spans of time where my sleep is replaced by staring at the dark ceiling, remembering the pain after my surgery. I replay the hematoma, the cyst, the orders of Tylenol, ignored calls, and eventual emergency room visits, and the confusion. That was the worst part. You were supposed to be helping me, and instead, I had the sinking feeling that once your money was paid and the body was sewn up, you no longer gave a damn. And I was considered a good result.

I remember the faces of everyone I recommended you to in the months leading up to my operation. I wonder if it was just me that you treated this way, or if I had recommended them into the hands of a woman who would rather you writhe in pain for days than impact her opioid prescription score or re-operation rate. In my heart, I know they will never speak about it, even if they experienced what I did. I know the culture they are engaged in which ingratitude for the community’s addiction of choice would never be tolerated. We were all in the habit of choosing a medical suicide over a social one. I hope, for their sake, that you had kinder hands than the ones you had for the other young women who followed me into your office. I hope for both our sakes that they don’t feel as I do. It is hard enough to live with what I have done to myself.

The hormones have been flushed from my system now. It’s taken years to return my body to its original shape. The pounds of excess weight shed like a second skin, the remainder redistributing over my frame as if it had been waiting for the opportunity to return to normalcy. Even my face settled from the swelling, my thick neck once again proportional. The only reminder that remains of my odyssey is the thick pink-and-white scars carved across my chest, the red, twisted approximations that you claimed to be nipples sitting wide and lopsided on my uneven pecs. This was a good result for you, and I deluded myself into thinking it looked natural for longer than I would care to admit. Over the following months, I realized that the edge of my old areola was tucked into the scar line, discolored, and poking ingrown hairs into the scar tissue. I felt sick. Misled. Betrayed, even, by the young, smiling doctor who had assured me of so much. What I had thought would be the last step in my transition became the last thorn in my side as I attempted to return to myself.

I have found another surgeon, one who cares about women, to help put me back together. It will take time, but he will bring me as close as possible to how I was before you. I want to feel whole again. My body was never the problem, and your participation in my self-harm delayed this realization by years. I hope one day you wake up and realize that you are gorging yourself on the destruction of traumatized women who need psychological care, and I hope that it haunts you. I wish you would use your training to help instead of harm, but I suppose that doesn’t line the pockets quite the same.

Though you will never read this, I believe you will feel the words.

– Ginny

Ginny Welsh is an artist and writer who spent her teen and early adult years enthralled with the world of transition. Though her medical transition would be seen as “successful”, the process was one of medical neglect and destruction. Disillusioned by the culture of delusion, lies, and inevitable health issues associated with transition, she finally began her detransition in 2024. She now lives as a happily married lesbian, deconstructing the industry of transition through her work.

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