K.D.HOSPITAL TrueShape FACIAL FEMINIZATION SURGERY BASICS
Your facial expressions – your personality – your beauty – these are all attributes given to the surely most exposed sum of gender markers on the human body that is apparent and visible – your face.
As a transgender individual without FFS, people will always stare at you, wondering whether you are female or male. And there is a simple reason for this.
Within the first moment, one sees a face, the brain will assign it a male or female gender identity. Numerous studies were done trying to find out, how and why the human brain identifies the gender of a face within milliseconds of seeing one. Still, it has not been unraveled how this is being done exactly.
What we do know about facial gender is this:
During childhood, all human faces are of a female type. This is why social transitioning is possible at all time before puberty, simply because changing the way a child dresses and changing the haircut will transform a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy.
As soon as puberty kicks in the situation change in a very drastic way. The prevalent sex hormones – estrogen in girls and testosterone in boys – get produced in larger quantities triggering irreversible changes in the body of the young child.
For the face, that means certain gender markers will develop. In boys, it will change the female child face to a male face – and in girls, estrogen will enhance the present female child appearance even further and will make the face even more feminine, besides of all the other changes the hormones trigger in your body.
Please look at this excellent BBC video, where you can start the simulation of how the face of the child changes from child face to male face and from child face to female face – having one and the same origin!
Simply choose the female or male body in the “interactive window” via the “female” or “male” symbol located at the top right of the interactive window.
Then choose the “Face” button next to the cheek.
Then play the video of facial change that appears in the lower right video box.
Once the phase of puberty has changed your face the way it was predestined by the hormones present because of your biological sex, there is only the surgical option available to help MtF transgender individuals by correcting this circumstance by removing a great number of the male facial gender markers.
One facial gender marker that can be removed without surgical intervention is facial hair. At K.D.HOSPITAL we treat that with facial hair laser epilation.
In the natural surgical approach, we at K.D.HOSPITAL reverse the testosterone-induced facial gender marker changes as much as possible.
Still, simply reversing the testosterone effects on the bone tissue of your face is not enough!
This is why we at K.D.HOSPITAL always include malar implants to compensate for the effect that estrogen has on the facial bone tissue. Estrogen makes the cheekbones grow and have them appear more prominent – a strong and exposed female facial gender marker feature.
For these procedures the face gets divided into three parts:
1. the upper third, including the hair, hairline, and the forehead
2. the middle third, including the cheeks and the nose
3. the lower third, including the chin, the jaw and the Adam‘s apple
The testosterone markers that want removal and the estrogen marker that wants to be created in those 3 areas are:
1. forehead reconstruction
2. hairline correction/ hair pattern baldness
3. rhinoplasty
4. malar implants
5. genioplasty / chinplasty
6. jaw reduction
7. trachea shave/ Adam‘s apple reduction