I have a date for gender confirmation surgery! August 3rd, 2020.

I’ve decided to go with Dr. Heidi Wittenberg for my vaginoplasty. She is who I have been researching for the past year and my consultation with her last week confirmed that she is everything I had been hoping for. Her staff were all wonderful and friendly. And she was very approachable with a great bedside manner and excellent at explaining the process and answering questions. She seems very factual and will be straightforward with the risks and complications. She also has the training in alternate techniques such as peritoneal pull through that would allow her to perform a revision surgery with the latest technology if that was needed. More importantly, she feels like someone I can trust completely and it makes sense to me to have a woman with a background in gynecology and urology doing my care.

I did do a second consultation while I was in San Francisco with Dr. Thomas Satterwhite who trained with Dr. Wittenberg at Brownstein and Crane. He comes highly recommended from friends but I didn’t have the greatest experience with him. In both his intro video and in person he was very fixated on BMI (Body Mass Index) and treated it as medical fact, despite the vast body of evidence that it is wildly inaccurate, scientifically useless, and never intended by the creator to be used on an individual basis. He brought it up multiple times in my 20 minute consult to warn me that if I gained 10 lbs before next summer, I would be ineligible for the surgery. And yes, I have what many people would consider excess fat around my belly, but I am not objectively that fat of a person. I am tall and large and I am built that way naturally. In fact, I am pretty average in build for a white American.

If I, who have quite a bit of relative privilege, am receiving this much fat phobia from him, how much more pronounced would that be for the many trans people who are larger than me? And if he puts stock in pseudoscience like the BMI, what other areas does he make inaccurate conclusions in? To me, this is the kind of thing I would expect from a plastic surgeon that makes money off of fatphobia. And maybe that’s his background, but I’m not giving him money to support that. Even if he was the best surgeon around. Luckily, I have choices.

Now I’m not saying other people haven’t had wonderful experiences with Satterwhite, but I loved Wittenberg and I’m excited to be having her do my surgery. Next up, I am submitting documentation to get laser hair removal done on my genitals to prepare the area for surgery. Then I need to get 3 letters from my physician, therapist, and a PhD level psychiatrist because my insurance still goes by the outdated WPATH standards of medical gatekeeping.

In the meantime, I’m starting my countdown now for surgery. 377 days!

If you would like to contribute to my transition fund, you can donate at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/haven-gender-confirmation-treatments