%0 Journal Article
%T Gender, Ethnicity, and Transgender Embodiment: Interrogating Classification in Facial Feminization Surgery
%A Eric Plemons
%J Body & Society
%@ 1460-3632
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1357034X18812942
%X Facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a set of bone and soft tissue procedures intended to feminize the faces of transgender women. In the surgical evaluation, particular facial features are identified as ¡®sex specific¡¯ and targeted for intervention as such. But those features do not exhibit ¡®maleness¡¯ or ¡®femaleness¡¯ alone; they are complexly entwined with morphologies of ethnic classification. Based on clinical observation, I show how the desired feminine ideal conflicted with facial characteristics identified as ¡®ethnic¡¯. In FFS practice, ¡®masculinity¡¯ and ¡®ethnicity¡¯ were entangled as the constitutive outsides by which desirable ¡®femininity¡¯ was articulated. I argue that surgery that self-consciously enacts a patient¡¯s move away from physiognomically identifiable ethnicity in order to achieve an ostensibly unmarked and neutral femininity becomes not only a process of feminizing the face but of whitening it, regardless of whether ¡®white¡¯ features are the express desire of the patient or aim of the surgeon
%K ethnicity
%K facial feminization surgery
%K femininity
%K transgender medicine
%K whiteness studies
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1357034X18812942