LAUSR

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text Abstract Various recent developments, including legislation in 2014 banning healthcare discrimination against gender minorities, have contributed to expanding insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, which includes facial gender confirmation surgery (FGCS). Increasing evidence suggests FGCS improves quality-of-life outcomes, but literature evaluating FGCS patient demographics, surgical risk factors, procedures, and complications is limited. Therefore, the authors conducted a study of a national surgical database from 2005 to 2019 attempting to fill in these literature gaps. Statistics were used to assess temporal trends after 2014. A total of 203 FGCS cases were identified, with the earliest occurring in 2013. Case volume increased annually from 2015–2019. The average patient age was 34.0 years and racial demographics largely mirrored national estimates for the transgender/non-binary population. Obesity (20.7%) and hypertension (3.9%) were the only patient co-morbidities, although a relatively high proportion were underweight (5.4%). The majority of cases were outpatient procedures (66.5%) conducted by either plastic surgery (38.9%) or otolaryngology (61.1%). Comparing FGCSs by anatomic site, the proportion of tracheal procedures decreased between 2015–17 and 2018–19 (25.6% vs. 10.7%, P = 0.0002) whereas the proportion of brow/forehead reconstructions increased (32.6% versus 63.1%, P = 0.0005). These changes coincided with an increase in mean operative time (168.6 minutes versus 260.0, P = 0.0002). Complications were rare (3.9%), and the most common was surgical site infection (3.4%), a previously unreported outcome in the FGCS literature. Overall, FGCS patients are mostly young healthy individuals from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, and they have few surgical complications. The increasing volume and complexity of FGCSs may be a result of expanding insurance coverage for previously unaffordable procedures.