Lucie Isle shares her experience with facial feminisation surgery ahead of the Second Gender Affirming Health Forum
BY LUCIE ISLE, IMAGE BY GETTY VIA CANVA
In June 2023, you’d have found me in a Catalonian apartment, battered and bruised, with a face like a notorious Batman villain. If you timed it right, you’d have caught me making comedy reels, gurning at the camera and snarling in a Heath Ledger cadence “Wanna know how I got these scars?”.
If you’d have told me, just days after Facial Feminisation Surgery (FFS), that the same people I was teasing on Instagram would have invited me to host their flagship trans healthcare event, I’d have laughed. But just over a year and a half later and I’m reprising my role as “the trans Joker”, as I host the Second Gender Affirming Health Forum, with Facialteam in London.
My battered face was the result of a highly specialised bit of skull magic known as Facial Feminisation Surgery (FFS). Since coming out as transgender in 2021, I knew FFS was something important to me. It isn’t a beautification procedure, it’s a feminisation procedure. The ravages of a testosterone-fuelled male puberty resulted in all sorts of irreversible changes: facial hair and my voice deepening. It also changed my bone structure and, importantly for FFS, my brow bone.
FFS seeks to undo those changes, with some carefully selected procedures that get the most feminisation, for the minimum intervention. For me, most of the work was on my forehead, nose and hairline, because I was lucky enough to have a very feminine jaw: something I formerly covered up with a beard so bad, I once earned the nickname “wispy bearded fuck”.
On the day of surgery, before going under, I was terrified. It was my first ever surgery, and my mind kept wandering about what would happen if I woke up mid-procedure with my face half peeled off.
It also didn’t help that the night before, after a calming ritual of essential oils and meditation music, high speed jets of hot water burst out of a leaking ceiling pipe and filled my apartment. I thought I was hallucinating with the anxiety of surgery the next day, but it was only when water crept under my door that I realised it was real. Let’s just say I had an FFS moment before my FFS moment (see what I did there).
FFS isn’t the only surgery I’ve had, or will have. The world of contemporary gender affirming medicine is something 1970s science fiction could have only dreamed of. We’ve got scars being reduced with lasers, noses reshaped with the power of sound, and skulls being literally sculpted by hand.
People often ask me, has FFS changed my life? Absolutely. I’m no longer misgendered by strangers, and I feel more at home in my body. The results were almost instant. I went from being called “mate”, to a month later, having basic DIY mansplained to me and being heckled from passing vehicles.
To be honest right now, that’s not even my biggest problem.
My main worry is taking a joke too far at the Gender Affirming Health Forum. Let’s just hope my Joker material goes down better than Folie à Deux did.
To book your free space visit: facialteam.eu/2nd-gender-affirming-health-forum/
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