gatekeeping

BMI Cutoffs are unscientific and harmful

As I’ve written about before, BMI (Body Mass Index) is an unscientific concept that is often used to deny trans people life-saving surgeries. It is treated by far too many surgeons 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.

Recently, the only surgeon in Washington State, Geoffrey Stiller, formerly one of the few surgeons who would accept fat patients, updated his policies quietly to exclude people over the arbitrary and oft-used cutoff of 35 BMI. That means that at least two people close to me are now being denied gender affirming surgery without so much as a notification about the change. So I wanted to take the opportunity to share some scientific research recently published on the topic.

  1. Recent research shows that there is no correlation between BMI and surgical complication rates in trans people in either vaginoplasty (bottom surgery) or mastectomy (top surgery)
  2. “Obesity” (aka normal body variation) is very common in trans people seeking surgery (26% at Mount Sinai) and did not change despite efforts to lose weight prior to surgery
  3. BMI is not an empirically based method of denying gender-affirming surgery

Trans people should not have to bear the burden of educating providers about our care but all too often we are put in that position anyway. So next time a surgeon tells you they won’t perform surgery because of “policies”, please feel free to use this research to push back on them. Even if you don’t win a single conversation, hopefully you will plant a seed and prompt them to actually read the scientific literature on the topic. I found these articles with only a cursory review of the topic and I’m not even a doctor.

Citations

  1. Ives GC, Fein LA, Finch L, Sluiter EC, Lane M, Kuzon WM, Salgado CJ. Evaluation of BMI as a Risk Factor for Complications following Gender-affirming Penile Inversion Vaginoplasty. Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open. 2019 Mar 13;7(3):e2097. doi: 10.1097/GOX.0000000000002097. PMID: 31044103; PMCID: PMC6467628.
  2. Rothenberg KA, Gologorsky RC, Hojilla JC, Yokoo KM. Obesity is Not Associated with Complications or Revisions after Gender-Affirming Mastectomy in Transgender Patients. Plastic and Maxillofacial Surgery. 2019 Oct 1;229(4):sup1. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2019.08.494
  3. Martinson TG, Ramachandran S, Lindner R, Reisman T, Safer JD. HIGH BODY MASS INDEX IS A SIGNIFICANT BARRIER TO GENDER-CONFIRMATION SURGERY FOR TRANSGENDER AND GENDER-NONBINARY INDIVIDUALS. Endocr Pract. 2020 Jan;26(1):6-15. doi: 10.4158/EP-2019-0345. Epub 2019 Aug 28. PMID: 31461357.
  4. Lisa M. Brownstone, Jaclyn DeRieux, Devin A. Kelly, Lanie J. Sumlin, and Jennifer L. Gaudiani. Transgender Health. ahead of printhttp://doi.org/10.1089/trgh.2020.0068

Insurance approval

I know to most cisgender people this doesn’t sound significant but I just got word from my surgeon’s office today that I got insurance approval for gender confirmation surgery!

This is one of those things that should be a normal occurrence. But for trans people, we have had to fight so hard for generations to get these surgeries covered by insurance that it is still a big deal for us to have these basic rights. I remember not that long ago when my friends were going to Thailand because that’s the only way most people could afford to get surgery out of pocket. And because of that legacy, there are still so few surgeons in the US that even those of us in major cities like Seattle have to travel out of state and incur huge expenses to get these surgeries.

It’s also significant because of the amount of medical gatekeeping we have to endure to get there. I can’t think of a single procedure where a cis person has to get more than one letter of support. But most trans people require 3 letters from MDs, therapists, and PhD level psychiatrists to get this insurance approval.

For me, I got these letter last fall because I was told the surgeon was going to ask for insurance approval in late winter. But they waited too long to submit paperwork so I had to go get the letter updated because they needed to be within 6 months. Which meant that the first time around I got an insurance denial which was scary even though I knew why.

The point of this story is, if you have the authority to be a medical gatekeeper for a trans person, PLEASE make it as smooth as possible for them. There are a variety of reasons that trans people don’t want surgeries and shouldn’t need them to transition. But for those of us who do, we are usually overwhelmingly sure that this is what we want. So don’t make it harder for us than it needs to be. Trust us to be the experts on our own experiences. And if you get asked for a perfunctory piece of paper, just sign it.