Apparently it’s been over a month and a half since we reached internal consensus on this, but I still haven’t made any progress on this subject other than asking at a local support group: Unfortunately no-one there seems to care much about this subject (only SFS/SRS for some reason), so it wasn’t much help.
What I want to know is: How do you actually find a surgeon to perform this kind of procedure? And how do you decide if it turns out there are multiple practical options? Is it worth leaving the region to go by plane (post-surgery train ride sounds a lot nicer than flying…)?
Details: We’re located in the EU and the public health insurance carriers don’t cover it.* We have the money to pay for this kind of procedure privately, but it would be better not to put too much stress on our savings as our income isn’t that great. This also means there is no list of “in network” surgeons (that’s a USian concept, I think?) to consult. We’ve been on HRT for over a year and a half, still weigh less than 90kgs and are AMAB and unlikely to be inter (that checks all the usual boxes, I think).
Any resources or personal stories would be appreciated as well.
* In fact, they were apparently recently sued into at least covering facial lasing, but everything trans-related is a default-no with public insurance unless overruled in court. In theory one could perform the procedure in Denmark (where it is covered), get the SS2 form rejected by the public health insurance around here, then spend the next couple of years in court with them though.
That helped, I think! There was this big blockade on how to even get started (see opening post) and having a list of concrete options to evaluate actually made this go from an abstract thing to something actionable. (In hindsight, I should have been able to find this myself, but I just never considered searching like that, even though I regularily do research on other topics.)
In any case, I’ve one booked one consultation with the trusted-but-expensive baseline for us so far. We’ll see how it goes.
In the mean time, while doing somewhat related health research I’ve also stumbled on the fact that, there might by local options available for the nasal surgery in the city we live in. Since it generally seems to recommended to split FFS into multiple parts, doing the nose part first with a local nasal surgeon* and having a more specialized FFS surgeon harmonize the remaining face abroad later on might be an interesting option.
If anyone has any specific recommendations those would still be appreciated!
* Their adverts are definitely aimed at cis-women, but looking at their published before-after pictures (they have some!) they might as well been trans as far their pre-surgury nose shapes are concerned, so I doubt there is any difference.