Apparently it’s been over a month and a half since we reached internal consensus on this, but I still haven’t made any progress on this subject other than asking at a local support group: Unfortunately no-one there seems to care much about this subject (only SFS/SRS for some reason), so it wasn’t much help.
What I want to know is: How do you actually find a surgeon to perform this kind of procedure? And how do you decide if it turns out there are multiple practical options? Is it worth leaving the region to go by plane (post-surgery train ride sounds a lot nicer than flying…)?
Details: We’re located in the EU and the public health insurance carriers don’t cover it.* We have the money to pay for this kind of procedure privately, but it would be better not to put too much stress on our savings as our income isn’t that great. This also means there is no list of “in network” surgeons (that’s a USian concept, I think?) to consult. We’ve been on HRT for over a year and a half, still weigh less than 90kgs and are AMAB and unlikely to be inter (that checks all the usual boxes, I think).
Any resources or personal stories would be appreciated as well.
* In fact, they were apparently recently sued into at least covering facial lasing, but everything trans-related is a default-no with public insurance unless overruled in court. In theory one could perform the procedure in Denmark (where it is covered), get the SS2 form rejected by the public health insurance around here, then spend the next couple of years in court with them though.
I'm in Australia, and when I got FFS, there were no Australian options, so I had to go out of the country. Ultimately, what decided me was a combination of speaking directly with people who had used the surgeons I was looking at, and speaking the surgeon/surgeons team.
Seeing their results and hearing their experiences gave me the assurance I needed to commit to handing money over to a surgeon on another continent
Hi Ada, I'm in Australia too, any chance you could DM the name of your surgeon or clinic? I've been trying to research options but it's hard to find Australia specific recommendations
I went with Dr Javier Rossi in Argentina in 2019. It was all organised through t-change. I'll try and answer questions publicly so others can see them too, but if you've got anything specific you'd like to ask not in the public eye, feel free to drop me a DM or hit me up on Matrix if you use it
Fantastic! Thanks so much!