While insurance coverage for GRS has benefited countless lives, an unintentional side effect has been what Dr. Marci Bowers, a San Francisco-based gender surgeon who has been practicing for three decades, refers to as a culture of “permissiveness”: “As far as an insurance company goes, if the patient survived the operation, leaves the hospital in a prescribed amount of time, and doesn’t die of some hideous complication or is not readmitted multiple times,” she says, “that is their measure of success.”

Funny to hear that from Bowers, the surgeon who botched Jazz Jennings’ GRS so badly he had to have 2 revisions and is in need of a 3rd.

While any surgery, especially one performed on the body’s most sensitive bits, carries risk there’s nothing inherently dangerous about GRS for trans women. According to a 2018 study, the percentage of trans people who end up regretting vaginoplasty is about 1 percent, significantly lower than your average knee surgery.

I’d like to know what kind of follow-up they were doing and what long-term results are.