Sex Reassignment Surgery

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Sex reassignment surgery (SRS) or gender reassignment surgery is a surgical procedure that changes a person from one gender to another. Males can have surgery that turns them into a female and females can have surgery that turns them into males. The procedure involves the reconstruction of the genitals of an individual into genitals of the opposite sex. Procedures are conducted on other parts of the body to change how the person looks physically. This is to ensure that the person looks like the intended gender. For example in male to female sex surgery, breast implants are added whereas In female to male surgery, the chest area is reconstructed and the breasts removed, to give the appearance of a male chest as opposed to female breasts (Lothstein, L, 2013)
This procedure is part of a treatment for gender identity disorder also known as gender dysphoria in transgender and trans-sexual people. Studies show that overall success rates for these surgeries is between 68% - 86%. This success rate has to be taken cautiously because; lack of long-term follow-up studies makes this information misleading. While sex reassignment surgery remains a viable treatment procedure, it is challenging to discern how to determine which patients will most benefit from this procedure. The selection criteria available are informally extracted from clinical guidelines put down by the various gender identity clinics. These criteria may be used in establishing generally acceptable guidelines for referring a patient for the procedure. In order for these guidelines to be of use, one would have to ensure that the procedure is done only by skilled surgeons in selected university-based clinics that could provide follow-up. This would mean limiting all sex reassignment surgery to a select number of hospitals in the United States. While raising certain ethical issues, the current abuse comes from the widespread accessibility to sex reassignment surgery procedures ...