News and Features
Sex Reassignment as an Artform
By Roberta Staley published Feb 21, 2011
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A rock-star-turned-doctor is one of Canada’s only sex-reassignment specialists, and a leader in the fight to get funding for people trapped in the wrong bodies
At age three, Cadence Matthews knew that he should have been a girl. He told his parents. "You're a boy," they responded. Matthews tried again to convince them at age five, seven, nine, and 13-"then I gave up." But Matthews did live as a girl, wearing makeup and girls' clothes, enduring classmates' derision and parental anger. Worse, all she saw when she looked in the mirror was "ugly. I would walk down side streets and back alleys to avoid being on main streets where people would look at me."
The Internet opened the door to understanding her gender dysphoria. And then Matthews discovered Dr. Cameron Bowman, a plastic surgeon who specializes in sex reassignment. Nearly a year ago, Cadence Matthews-now a slender, long-haired, 23-year-old actor and singer-underwent an operation called facial feminization surgery, or FFS. By then, her parents had accepted her as female, and generously paid the $25,000 cost.
It took Bowman more than nine hours to perform a string of procedures that included rhinoplasty and silicon cheek implants. "The week I had the surgery done I was swollen like a balloon and looked totally hideous. But I felt so much more confident than I ever had and instantly went back to walking on crowded streets," says Matthews, who's planning more procedures. "Now I feel that I'm pretty-in the right way, the way I want to be."
Such is Bowman's profound effect on his patients. As one of only three physicians in Canada trained in sex reassignment surgery (SRS), he turns corporeal men into women and vice versa-or he would, if the provincial government let him. As things stand, phalloplasties and vaginoplasties (constructive surgeries that cost $20,000 and $9,300 respectively) are not performed in B.C. Phalloplasties, which are still termed "experimental" though thousands have been performed since the 1940s, are not funded here at all. Vaginoplasties are funded, but patients must fly to Montreal for the procedure. In B.C., Bowman is only permitted to perform less dramatic surgeries-he squares chests into male forms, smooths them into female forms. In a single day, he can do three chest surgeries, either constructing breasts for a transfemale or removing the breasts and sculpting a male chest for a transmale.
