In this episode of the GenderGP podcast Fionn Collins (he/him), a trans man working for the student union at Technological University Dublin, talks to Marianne about having a second top surgery, following unsatisfactory results from the first. He shares his advice and feedback for anyone considering top surgery for themselves, and candidly discusses what he wished he’d known beforehand.

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 Links:GenderGP Podcast - Top surgery for trans guys

GenderGP Podcast - Top Surgery: what to ask, with Ioannis Ntanos

Gay Ireland News - Irish trans activist opens up about life-changing journey abroad for top surgery

Follow Fionn on Twitter: @urnofionn

We can provide top surgery referrals

 The GenderGP PodcastTop Surgery: Getting it rightHello, this is Dr. Helen. Webberley welcome to our Gender GP Podcast, where we will be discussing some of the issues affecting the trans and nonbinary community in the world today, together with my co-host Marianne Oakes, a trans woman herself, and our head of therapy.

Marianne Oakes:Good Afternoon and welcome to the Gender GP podcast. Today I've got Fionn with me, who is somebody that Helen Webberley had spotted on Twitter and had been talking about top surgery I'm assuming, but I'm not going to make any presumptions here. So I'm going to hand over to Fionn just to introduce themselves and just tell us a little bit about their journey and how they ended up having top surgery. Over to Fionn.

Fionn Collins:Hiya my name is Fionn, I'm 24. I'm from Dublin, Ireland. And yeah, so I recently just had revision top surgery in Poland with Dr. Lembas in February, obviously during COVID times. But yeah, I had my first kind of top surgery in September, 2019, but I'm out as FTM or a trans man, whatever, I'm pretty chill and my pronouns are he him since 2017. So I've had not only one, but I've had two top surgeries. Yeah, I suppose we can get a little bit into it if you'd like.

Marianne Oakes:Yeah. So, interestingly enough you, you made the point that I've seen that you went to Poland and it was in COVID times. So I'm assuming that that in and of itself posed some difficulties.

Fionn Collins:It was definitely difficult enough, you know, to you're traveling to get like surgery abroad in itself. It's already difficult. It was extremely, extremely hard because of COVID and I'm not sure you're aware, but in Ireland we're currently on our longest lockdown it's level five. So that means, you know, like no, un- essential travel, you know, not allowed to pass five kilometers, you know, everything like that. So it is quite difficult and we have to get for Poland, they have a requirement to have a negative COVID test. So obviously before you have to get your negative COVID test and you fly, and then you have negative COVID test when you get surgery. And then before you come home again, you need another one. So you already need three negative COVID tests. And the thing is, it's extremely difficult to get them publicly. You have to go privately as well, because if you get public, when you need symptoms. They are not going to let anybody fly with symptoms. So you've got a weird kind of loophole there. Or if you just have to go private, which is a hundred euro per COVID test,