One day near the end of 2023, I went into the roti shop in my Brooklyn neighborhood for doubles. I’m obsessed with the classic Trinidadian street-food dish, which brings a Caribbean twist to the rotis and chana masala my Pakistani family cooked when I was growing up. While waiting to order, a man in the shop looked at me and paused. He brought his eyes up to mine and then down to my feet, staring for seconds on end. Then he burst out laughing.
“Ohhhh shit, you — you almost got me!” he said, cackling, turning to his friend. His friend added, “Ha! You always gotta check the neck. Look for the Adam’s apple.”
At this point, I had been living socially as a trans woman for just under two years, always stepping out in miniskirts and dresses, donning long black wavy hair, and never leaving my house without my mug beat. My skin began to prickle and my blood boiled as the men’s laughter echoed through the shop. I started shouting, berating their dirty shoes, calling them broke, low-credit-score, short-ass motherfuckers. I grabbed my doubles, walked out of the shop, and said, “Try a bitch, I dare you.”
On the verge of tears, I walked home, replaying their words. I’d been clocked before, but this one stung. I looked in a mirror at my Adam’s apple, the gap between my eyes and eyebrows, the stubble that dotted the ridges of my mouth, and then at my big, beautiful Pakistani nose. I looked like my dad.
That’s when I knew: I wanted facial feminization surgery.
I started my search online: Reddit threads, YouTube videos, Instagram. But I was disappointed. I didn’t see any South Asian dolls sharing their post-FFS looks. The “after” photos I found were of non-white sisters leaving FFS with smaller, dainty Western features. Endless Kim Kardashians with cinched noses. Social-media glam filters copied and pasted. Gorgeous but not me.
Talking to my Black and brown trans sisters, I heard regrets. Some felt their surgeons had made them more womanly in ways that echoed whiteness: smaller noses, pointed chins, almond-shaped eyes. I wondered, what does femininity look like outside of whiteness? When I imagined my own femininity, I saw women like Abida Parveen and Noor Jehan: distinctive Pakistani faces with smaller chins, lower hairlines, and higher lips, but big noses.
By early 2024, I’d narrowed my search to three doctors and reached out to one. On the phone, I began to explain how I wanted to look like myself after the procedure, inclusive of my Pakistani features and with only minor adjustments to my nose. The doctor made me feel like I didn’t know what I was talking about. “Well, if we don’t change the shape of your nose, you won’t really get that feminized face you’re looking for,” she said to me. I never called her back.
I finally saw a way forward when I saw my sister — let’s call her Ava — at Body Hack, a trans-centered party in Brooklyn. She was more radiant than I’d ever seen. Her defining Black features were pronounced, different, but wholly her own. It was like the universe finally caught up, revealing the extraordinary beauty Ava always carried. She hadn’t become someone else; she’d become more herself.
“FFS, girl?” I whispered to her. She confirmed coyly. I begged her to help a girl out, just let a doctor’s name slip. She said she would never give away that information, but that “for you, it’s different,” and shared her surgeon’s name. But me, I don’t gatekeep. I called Dr. Joshua Rosenberg’s office right at 10 a.m. the next day when it opened.
The office said that to come in for an FFS consultation I’d need an evaluation from my primary-care doctor and a mental-health note from a licensed therapist. I set up a regular physical, and when chatting next with my therapist, she asked me if I had body dysmorphia. When I described how I felt after the incident in Flatbush, she wrote me a note quickly. Before I knew it, I was sitting in Dr. Rosenberg’s office.
I told the intake PA, “My nose is big, and I want it to stay big,” launching into a rant about the Kim Kardashian effect: dolls getting clocked because of the copied-and-pasted features. She cut me off with a smile, saying, “You came to the right doctor.” Soon, Dr. Rosenberg came in with a three-dimensional rendering of my face. He pointed to each part and explained the changes he intended to make, showing me how he was only going to work with the features I already had instead of trying to shape me into something new. I agreed with everything he showed me — until we got to my nose.
He said that medical sciences agreed that there were three steps necessary to make a nose more feminized: shorten the length, smooth out any dorsal humps, and lower the projection of the nasal bridge. I was okay with bringing my nasal bridge down, but I certainly didn’t want my nose to be shorter or to lose the small hump I had before my nostril. I told Dr. Rosenberg I didn’t care what “medical sciences” said. I was not going to walk out of there looking European.
He said, “I’m going to be honest with you. The day after your surgery, you’re gonna wake up, have red hair, and you’ll be a white woman named Rebecca.” We both laughed, and he promised to preserve my nose’s unique character while ensuring I’d love the results. We agreed on nine procedures: fat grafting to reshape the facial contours on my forehead; a scalp advancement to lift my brow line; a genioplasty to make my chin pointier; a mandibular augmentation to reshape my jawline; an osteotomy to reshape my eye sockets; a soft-tissue redistribution to align my skull with the entirety of my new face; a replacement of the bone flap above my eyebrows; and a partial rhinoplasty to reduce the projection of the middle of my nose.
To get ready for surgery, I had to quit weed at least two weeks ahead of time. A week out, I started taking arnica tablets to help with the swelling and bruising. From midnight the night before, no food, no water, nothing in my body. I couldn’t sleep at all that night. The number 8.5, how many hours I would be under anesthesia, kept flashing through my mind. I knew anything after six hours began to pose medical risks.
The next morning, my friend dropped me off at Mt. Sinai. “I can’t believe you’re waking up with a new face,” he said. Oh my God. I would never see the face I had known for the past 31 years ever again. Was I ready for this?
Nearly nine hours after I first sat on the operating table, I woke up. My body was numb. I didn’t have any memory of what happened. I looked around the room and I was alone. A few minutes passed by and a nurse walked in and asked me, “How are you?” I told her I was about to throw up, and I did, several times.
The recovery was absolutely horrible. The combination of intense drugs, a liquid diet, and limited movement prevented me from sleeping for an entire ten days. If I looked in the mirror, I saw a monster, swollen and bloody, bandaged up tightly. That was one of the worst periods of my entire life. After seven days, I left the house for the first time for my post-op appointment. I started bawling my eyes out as soon as I walked into the doctor’s office.
I told the PA how I felt delirious from my lack of sleep and mortified to look at my face. “Why don’t we begin to take off some bandages?” she said. As the layers peeled away, I saw her expression shift, eyes wide with awe, like the first look I gave Ava when I saw her after her surgery. “You look soooo good,” she said. “Oh my God, your nooooseeee!”
She handed me a mirror. There it was: my big, beautiful, huge-ass Pakistani nose. Dr. Rosenberg had lowered the bridge without changing its size. It fit my face and met the space between my brows just right, still as long and wide as I’d always loved it. It wasn’t Kim Kardashian, and it wasn’t Abida or Noor. It was the face I saw inside of me for years, finally on the outside for the world to see, too.
I still wake up to that face changing with me every day. In total, it’s a 12-month recovery process for all of the swelling to go down and for the features to fit naturally within their assigned places. I know I still have parts of my face to discover. My eyebrows seem to get higher every day. My chin was becoming gradually more angular. When I go to brush my hair, I feel like I keep finding the hairline in a different place.
I look at new photos of myself and sometimes don’t recognize the girl I see reflected back at me. I’ll even put old photos next to the ones after FFS and sometimes struggle to see a difference. I’m more often gendered correctly now in public than I was before, but that, too, leaves me with some stinging feeling of guilt. Yet when I look at my nose in the mirror, or just catch the angle of it in a photo, that’s when I know I made the right choice.