The Nuclear Option - The Day My Face Changes Forever

We are now on the eve of me flying out to get my facial feminization surgery. For those who don’t know, this isn’t a nose job or a touch-up. It’s a radical set of combined procedures, predominantly bone work, that will alter my face forever.

I’ve known about FFS for the best part of a quarter of a century. Back in the days when I killed Stevie, I watched from a distance as others began to undergo it. The first pioneer was Douglas Ousterhout. He wasn’t a specialist in this field, there was no field. A trans woman came to him one day and said, “My forehead is too lumpy. How can you make it smooth like a woman’s?” He thought about it, then experimented on her, and then she came back again: “My jaw is too big. How can you make it smaller?” And so it began. From that first patient, and through years of trial and refinement, a whole branch of surgery was born. Over time, dozens of surgeons emerged across the world, trained in these techniques. And now, after twenty-five years of watching, it’s my turn.

I never thought I would actually do this, and yet here I am. I’m terrified in some ways, because so much rests on this for me. A girl I met in Toronto, Hanna, had hers done and she was beyond excited for me. She told me it was jaw-dropping to watch her face change as the swelling went down, week after week, prettier and prettier, until she finally felt like herself. I sensed her joy and wanted to drink it in, but it didn’t erase my fear. My fear isn’t about complications or numbness or even asymmetry. My fear is that it just won’t be good enough, that after all this I’ll still give off a whiff of a bleeding man. That I’ll give it my best shot and it won’t be enough.

And this really is the nuclear option. You can shape your body, you can style your hair, you can even trick the eye with clothes and makeup. But the tells, the forehead, the nose, the jaw, they give you away. That’s why this surgery is the big hitter. They’ll peel back the skin of my forehead all the way down to my eyes, rebuild the bone, smooth the sinus cavity, and open up the rims of my eyes. They’ll reposition my eyebrows and graft fat into my temples. They’ll rebuild my nose, graft fat into my cheeks, and operate on both my eyelids. They’ll do a deep-plane facelift through the mid-face, shorten and lift my upper lip, rebuild my chin, reduce my jaw, and give me a lower facelift and neck lift. My Adam’s apple will be removed, the skin of my chin resurfaced. And to finish, I may even get a modest breast enlargement.

It’s not a tweak. It’s total reconstruction.

I know the forehead will look brilliant almost instantly. I know the jaw will take months before I see the real effect. I know I’ll have to be patient as the swelling goes down. But still, the fear lingers: what if I’m not good enough, what if I wasn’t suitable, what if this was the wrong choice?

Yet on the flip side, I’m also preparing to be bowled over. To look in the mirror and see softness where hardness was, to smile and finally see her, fully, staring back at me. To feel that electricity running through me as recognition floods in. I sometimes glimpse that now, in flashes, but I believe I’ll see it much more once this is done.

I also know how emotional it might make me. I’m bracing for tears, for shock, for relief, while still leaving space for the possibility that it doesn’t come. It’s hard to reconcile hope and fear like that, but that’s the truth of this moment. And I admit, I’ll feel embarrassed if it doesn’t go well, because I’ve made such a big deal of it to the world. This was the procedure that finally killed my marriage.

The first surgeons I consulted, Facial Team in Spain, created virtual images of what I could look like. I showed them to my wife, and she was horrified. Horrified that I would no longer look like myself, like a member of my family, horrified that I didn’t even want to look like a man anymore. I think it was in that moment she realised she couldn’t live with any of this. And that was the end of us.

But the marriage is over now, and none of that changes what I have to do. I will not finish my transition until I have done everything. Every procedure I want, I will work through them all, as quickly as I can, until I’m ready to live the rest of my life as this person.

And I’ll be honest. It’s not about passing, or whether I’m “clockable” or not. Most people can spot a trans person anyway. What I want is simple: I want to be fucking pretty. Like any other woman, I want to be beautiful. That’s it. Some women had the joy of feeling beautiful in their twenties or thirties. I didn’t. I want that now, so badly.

So tomorrow I get on a plane. Terrified, hopeful, determined. Ready to take the nuclear option.