RT Book, Section
A1 Blasdel, Gaines
A1 Zhao, Lee C.
A1 Bluebond-Langner, Rachel
A2 Keuroghlian, Alex S.
A2 Potter, Jennifer
A2 Reisner, Sari L.
SR Print(0)
ID 1184176393
T1 Surgical Gender Affirmation
T2 Transgender and Gender Diverse Health Care: The Fenway Guide
YR 2022
FD 2022
PB McGraw Hill
PP New York, NY
SN 9781260459937
LK accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1184176393
RD 2024/04/19
AB Surgical  interventions  to  affirm  cultural  and  gendered  roles  in  society,  such  as  testicle  removal,  predate  the  Western  conception  of  the  gender  binary  and  contemporary  medical  models  of  gender  identity.  The  first  gender-affirming  surgical  program  in  Western  medical  practice  is  considered  to  have  been  Magnus  Hirschfield’s  Institute  for  Sexual  Science,  commencing  gender-affirming  procedures  in  1922.1  Early  conceptions  of  the  goal  of  gender-affirming  surgery  were  to  “correct”  the  external  form  to  a  discrete  female  or  male  appearance.  Surgical  intervention  was  treated  as  a  required  aspect  of  gender  affirmation  in  many  contexts,  a  legacy  that  continues  today  as  jurisdictions  require  sterilization  or  other  surgery  for  name  or  gender  marker  changes  on  official  government-issued  documentation.  Simultaneously,  surgery  was  withheld  from  the  majority  of  treatment-seeking  patients  who  were  deemed  poor  surgical  candidates  for  reasons  that  would  now  be  considered  inappropriate,  such  as  not  being  heterosexual  in  their  identified  gender.  Assessment  for  gender-affirming  surgery  has  been  explored  in  transgender  studies,  a  field  of  inquiry  whose  foundational  texts  describe  the  social  and  medicolegal  impact  of  power  relations  between  medical  professionals  and  transgender  and  gender  diverse  (TGD)  patients  seeking  surgery.2