Hayley Anthony is a transgender woman who helped design a new surgical technique for male to female gender affirmation surgery.
Dr. Jess Ting is director of surgery at the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Important information I do not have available is the names of the doctors in India who actually made the medical advance. Anthony discovered a paper on their research somewhere on the web and shared it with Dr. Ting.
The Indian doctors have been been building vaginas using tissue from the peritoneum, the tissue that holds your internal organs in place.
I kept thinking, there’s got to be something better,” he says. “But where were we going to find a large amount of pink, hairless, inner skin that secretes fluid?
Dr. Ting was even more impressed when he discovered that the peritoneum repairs itself when injured in a matter of days.
In July, Mount Sinai launched the country’s first medical fellowship dedicated explicitly to transgender surgery. Ting will be training one fellow each year and he’s hopeful they’ll stay on staff once they’re done to help meet the city’s growing demand. Another important part of their job will be to follow up with these surgery patients over the next few years; while the new procedure is showing superior results so far, it will be important to monitor to see how it holds up long term.
In May, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told a federal court that he’s reworking a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires states to cover transgender care through their Medicaid programs. The rewrite is likely to free states to refuse coverage for hormones, counseling, and surgeries for transgender men and women. Not that they have to wait; Price said he’s declining to enforce the rule in the meantime.