The happy patients who never make the programme
Dr Helen Webberley on Robby Starbuck: transition and children, Robby Starbuck
Surgery leaves trans people with regret and loss. The stories that circulate are almost always about complications, about what was given up, about the things that went wrong. That is what people assume the full picture looks like.
What I keep hearing, over and over, from trans men who have had chest surgery is joy. Not qualified joy, not joy-despite-the-complications, but the kind of relief that makes people laugh when they answer the question. Yes, sensation changes. Yes, there are risks, and I would never pretend otherwise. But when you ask the people who have actually lived it whether they would do it again, the answer is not complicated. The men who are quietly getting on with their lives, comfortable in their bodies for the first time, do not make compelling television. So they never appear. And the absence of their voices shapes what everyone else believes.
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