New surgery to enable transsexual women to sound more feminine

The co-director of otorhinolaryngology at the Quirón Marbella hospital, Juan Carlos Casado, has written a book about the operation

ÁNGEL ESCALERA

Friday, 23 February 2018, 10:26

For transsexual women, it is very important for their voice to sound as feminine as possible. This can be achieved through surgery: the operation is called Wendler glottoplasty and it increases the tension, alters the consistency and reduces the mass of the vocal cords to make a shorter larynx which emits more penetrating and feminine sounds, as Juan Carlos Casado, co-director of the otorhinolaryngology department at the Quirón hospitals in Marbella and the Campo de Gibraltar, explains.

Dr Casado has co-authored a book with Enrique Maraví Aznar, called 'Feminización de la voz. Abordaje multidisciplinar de la mujer transgénero', a guide to understanding the transition which transsexual women undergo at a surgical level. The book was presented earlier this week at the Cultural Hospital Real de la Misericordia (known as the Hospitalillo) in Marbella, in the presence of the mayor of Marbella, Ángeles Muñoz, and the manager of the Quirón hospitals in Malaga and Marbella, Tomás Urda.

Dr Casado says 40 voice feminisation operations have been carried out so far at the Quirón in Marbella, and another 20 at a hospital in Barranquilla (Colombia). He explains that Wendler glottoplasty enables transsexual patients to complete the final stage in a series of changes to become completely female in body and soul. Acquiring a feminine voice gives our patients the confidence they need to incorporate themselves into their new life without fear and without any type of complexes, he says.

Endoscopy

Juan Carlos Casado explains that the method applied is technically complex but because it is done via endoscopy through the mouth it leaves no external scars. The operation takes approximately an hour and a half and afterwards the patient has to rest their voice for two weeks. Later, they are given speech therapy.

Dr Casado says there was a need for his book because there are very few up-to-date manuals which explain the process of feminising the voice of transsexual women in a straightforward way.

The book contains several chapters which help people to understand the process of this type of operation and other aspects of becoming a transgender woman, such as hormone treatment, facial feminisation surgery and sexual reassignation surgery.

Many patients are worried that their voice doesn't match their appearance, in other words it doesn't sound feminine enough, he says. ENT specialists and speech therapists also play an important part in the process.

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