At Penn Medicine, we celebrate you as an individual and want to help you align your physical characteristics with your identity. Our board-certified plastic surgeons complete hundreds of gender-affirming surgical procedures each year with excellent outcomes.
Our team knows that high-quality gender confirmation surgery, also known as gender affirmation surgery, is only part of the journey to affirm your identity. We partner with our Department of Family Medicine and the Community of Health LGBTQIA Clinic, Philadelphia's Mazzoni Center and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Gender and Sexuality Development Program for complete care before and after your gender-affirming surgery.
Gender Confirmation Surgery: The Penn Medicine Difference
Our caring professionals are with you at each step as you affirm your identity through physical changes. When you trust Penn, you experience:
- Compassion: All patients at Penn are respected and celebrated. Penn’s LGBTQ Health Program is among the nation’s few of its kind, providing culturally competent, judgment-free health care.
- Highest standard of care: We follow the standards of care outlined by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, so you can feel confident you are receiving the best possible care.
- Holistic support: Our affiliations within our own system, the Mazzoni Center and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia ensure you are supported throughout your journey – physically and emotionally.
- Surgical expertise: Our plastic surgeons are consistently recognized among America's Top Doctors, Best Doctors in America and in the Top Docs issue of Philadelphia Magazine.
- Surgical innovation: Penn is the nation's leader in microsurgery, a highly complex procedure often used in gender affirmation surgeries. Our extensive experience in microsurgery results in excellent outcomes.
Gender-Affirming Surgeries
Penn Plastic Surgery, in collaboration with specialists across the health care system, offer the following gender-affirming surgical procedures:
- Bilateral mastectomy with chest reconstruction, also known as “top surgery” or transmasculine reconstruction. This procedure removes unwanted breast tissue and reconstructs the skin, nipples and areola.
- Breast augmentation, which uses implants or your own body fat to increase breast size and create shape.
- Facial surgery, which alters the structures of the face to appear more masculine or feminine.
- Body contouring to create a more masculine or feminine body shape.
Our partners in Urology, Urogynecology and Otolaryngology offer the following procedures:
- Orchiectomy, or removal of the testes (through Urology)
- Hysterectomy, which removes the uterus and ovaries (through Urogynecology)
- Voice Gender Reassignment (through Otolaryngology)
What is the Cost of Gender Confirmation Surgery?
If you and our surgical team determine you are a candidate for gender-affirming surgery, we work with you and your insurance company to determine coverage. If your insurance company does not cover gender confirmation surgery, we provide you an estimate of out-of-pocket expenses.
How Do I Get Started with Gender Confirmation Surgery?
At Penn, we follow the standards of care recommended by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. We know that surgery is only one part of the gender affirmation process. Depending on your insurance, desired outcomes and interventions, medical gender affirmation may involve many stages, treatments and potential evaluations by mental health professionals.
Our partners are experts in navigating these processes, and we recommend you contact them to help identify appropriate health care providers, make appointments and learn more. When it's the right time in your process to consider surgical affirmation, they will contact Penn Plastic Surgery to begin that phase of the journey. Our partners are:
Request an Appointment
Call 215-662-7300 or request an appointment online.