Psychological Effects of Facial Feminization or Masculinization Surgery.
Dr. Z talks about hitting depression or any kind of psychological traumatic response once you've had facial feminization or facial masculinization surgery. She sees a lot of people not thinking about how surgeries can affect you, affect your psyche, affect your relationship to yourself. As a result, they have a lot of depressive symptoms afterwards and go through quite a bit of despair.
Dr. Z is speaking particularly about facial surgery today, not bottom surgery, because there's something very different about getting surgical intervention on our face. Our faces are not only our focal points and the way we see ourselves—facial features are such an identifying feature of who we are, such a signature feature of how we see ourselves and how the world tends to see us. Also, when we get facial masculinization or feminization surgery, immediately after surgery we're able to look at ourselves in the mirror and see what has happened to us. Whereas with bottom surgery, there are bandages in place and it's not as easy to look at that region. Facial surgery is right there staring back at you.
Facial surgery tends to affect people differently than any other gender-related surgeries. What makes it very difficult and tends to cause depression or psychological trauma: when you look at yourself in the mirror after surgery, you see yourself in an incredibly vulnerable state. Oftentimes the face is bandaged, there are tubes coming out of your head, you're incredibly swollen, there's bruising—it's not a pretty picture. It's painful to look at yourself like that. Of course you know the surgery is behind you and you just have to wait for results to start coming in, especially for swelling to go away, which is positive. But seeing yourself beat up can be very painful.
A lot of people get almost traumatized when they see themselves for the first time. They start to feel "oh my goodness what have I done to myself." They get terrified wondering to what extent their face is going to be completely unrecognizable from the person they used to see in the mirror before. The shift in perspective from what you used to see to this new face, new facial features, new reconstruction can be pretty traumatic.
Watch to find out what you can do to prepare and get through this period.
