Top surgery

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Top surgery is a phrase used in the transgender community to mean a variety of kinds of gender-validating surgeries that can be done on the chest or breasts. This is as opposed to bottom surgery, which is any kind of gender-validating done on the reproductive organs or genitals.

Some nonbinary people call themselves transsexual and seek bottom surgery, and some don't. A nonbinary person doesn't need to have or want bottom surgery in order for their gender identity to be valid. This is true for transgender people of all kinds. Bottom surgery is an option that a person can take on their transition path only if they personally want or need it.

Content warnings: This page is not safe for work. Much talk about chest, breasts, and surgery on them.

Top surgery and gender identity

For transsexuals with binary gender identities, top surgery usually means a fairly specific variety of procedures, depending on the individual's needs to treat their gender dysphoria or make their body like that of a cisgender dyadic person of their own gender. For transgender women, bottom surgery usually means augmenting the size of their breasts, which could have already been developed thanks to Hormone therapy. For transgender men, it usually means removing the breast tissue from their chest so that it looks flat.

Resources about top surgery usually put different kinds of surgeries into groups based on whether they are in the female-to-male or male-to-female transition spectrums. In order to make this page's resources useful and helpful to nonbinary people, people born with intersex conditions, this page instead puts different kinds of surgeries into groups based on how the body is affected. This page is written to use anatomically correct and yet gender-neutral language everywhere possible. This includes calling the surgery patient the "patient" or "person," rather than "woman" or "man," and calling the patient by gender-neutral "they" pronouns.