preface: I'm not saying this all to compare struggles but to show that the assertion that our transition is "less" is just untrue.
- breast growth is a natural consequence of estrogen therapy. when trans women get top surgery at all, it is usually augmentation, which is generally minimally invasive and produces minimal scarring due to small incision size, depending on the procedure the patient chooses.
- in contrast, most trans men are not good candidates for minimal-scarring top surgery techniques and the most common procedure (double incision) involves two 6"+ incisions which usually require drains afterwards, and grafts or more complex incisions if the patient wants to keep their nipples.
- neovaginaplasty is generally a one- or two-stage operation which does not necessarily require flaps/grafts (for penile inversion, though other methods can be more complex).
- phalloplasty almost always requires at least two and possibly 3 or more staged operations, meaning the timeline can be a year or longer from the first procedure to the finished result to allow for healing between stages, and RFF (most common donor graft site) requires physical therapy to regain circulatory and motor function in the arm the graft came from. complications can involve loss of motor function or sensation of the hand.
- orchiectomy is an outpatient office procedure that only requires local anaesthetic and has a low rate of complications.
- hysterectomy is a major surgery requiring general anaesthesia or spinal nerve block and can result in complications such as significant blood loss, damage to nerves controlling urinary function, bowel perforation, etc.
- freezing sperm for future use is fairly straightforward, painless, and does not involve exogenous hormones if the patient has not already undergone HRT for an extended period. this can then be used to artificially inseminate a partner or surrogate at a later date, a process with a high success rate and low risk.
- freezing eggs for future use involves the administration of large doses of FSH and LH which in turn causes estrogens to spike in the patient, which may cause mood changes, cramps, and dysphoria. then a needle is inserted via the vaginal wall to harvest the eggs. lastly, actually reproducing using those frozen eggs requires IVF, which is considerably more expensive and complex than artificial insemination.
again, there are plenty of things about trans women's transition healthcare that are harder, and I'm not going to pretend it's as simple as one or the other group having an objectively worse time, but it's really easy to cherry pick if your agenda is to play oppression olympics.
