Hey! Happy pride everyone! Who wants to know how much it costs to become a cute anime girl?
I’m coming up on two years since I started my transition, and I have SRS scheduled for just over the anniversary mark. Just for fun I tallied up everything I’ve spent so far on medical transition. This includes estimates for the next few months, up to and including surgery. All prices are in Japanese Yen.
| Item | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| HRT (DIY) | 58,180 | Estrogen gel |
| GID diagnosis | 22,670 | Required for prescription HRT |
| HRT (prescription) | 353,280 | |
| Laser hair removal | 65,880 | 6 sessions, face |
| Name change | 800 | I’m a Japanese citizen so I had to apply to the courts here |
| Electrolysis | 1,499,080 | ~12 hrs prep for SRS and ~12 hrs face |
| SRS approval | 48,990 | Not fun |
| SRS consult | 33,860 | inc. estimates for blood work |
| SRS | 2,090,000 | PIV; Japanese hospital |
| Total | 4,172,740 |
I think I’m pretty much done with electrolysis, although I expect there will be a long tail tidying up. None of this is covered by insurance (with a long and stupid footnote I can go into another time), but it is at least tax deductible. Going forward, HRT will cost about ¥8,000 per month, reduced by 70% once I can change my legal gender and can start using insurance.
Notably this does not include:
- travel costs (substantial in my case since I live way out in the countryside)
- clothes
- cosmetics
- hitting up other girls in lesbian bars
Of course how much it costs depends a lot on what route you choose to take, so this is very much only a guideline! Let me know if you have any questions <3
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa awful, how trans friendly area are?(where live)
cost of transition in thirdworld dictatorship
oestrogel 0.6mg/g - $26/month(1 bottle/month)
progesterone 100mg - $7/month
useless diagnosis - $55 once in private clinic(free for luckshits in psych wards, but there almost impossible now but veryyy possible to get schizo spectrum or idk)
orchiectomy - around $3000 inside country plus 200$ maybe travel to city(using fictional diagnosises in surgery documentation)
name change - idk didnt get it but is should bee just small fees for new passport but more pain is other docs
gender change - sorry putler said no
bloodtest - varies but last time for hormones was $46 (E2, T, freeT, LH/FSH, DHT, prolactine, SHBG, albumin) usually cheaoer but my brainworms decided to test useless things such as freeT(overpaid as hell since i tried to calculate with albumin/shbg, total T and it was veeeeryy similar number what i got )
plus more
home internet - $11 500mbit
for party approved websitesprivate vps hosting which hopefully not blocked now(hetzner blocked as well digiocean and some others) sooo +4 euro for unlimited internet access with full speedrent - uwaaaa own flat here, but utilities is veryyy unfun atleast possible go to debt
idk wa more but it gets more expensive, if turn off TV zombiebox(idk i dont have TV)
want get out but - no money
to get money and education sadly i too disabled AuDHD, is basically impossible for me any highpaid job, lowpaids are usually awful but there possible to manage for peaceful lowpaid
get uni/college - impossible for my brain plus costs are awful
hope only for luck and parents
huuuh pain
for anyone wondering: its about 26k$
So, if I understand correctly, there is a whole “approval” process when you get SRS done in Japan…?
Yep! If you can read Japanese, the details are here.
It’s partly Japan being way behind the rest of the world as usual, and partly due to a case in the 60s where a surgeon was prosecuted for performing sex reassignment on a sex worker. This violated Japan’s eugenics law (fortunately repealed since then) against sterilization. (The same law required forced sterilization of disabled people, resulting in a court case which still pops up in the news from time to time). So the doctors got a bit jumpy and wrote guidelines to give themselves some legal protection.
Basically, a strict interpretation means you have to get a psychiatrist to rule out any other possible explanation before you’re allowed to transition (that includes hormones, not just SRS). Up until last year, RLE was a requirement. Fortunately most specialist gender clinics here are a bit more relaxed and tend to follow WPATH, so getting started is quite easy. But to get approval for surgery you still need the mental health people involved, and despite having lived as a woman for over a year at that point (with documented proof!) they weren’t convinced and wanted to start the observation period from scratch. They were kind enough (!) to cut the period down to six months, though, so I had to go into Tokyo once a month for a 30-second appointment so they could check I was still being girly enough. No, seriously: they explained at the beginning that it would be a problem if I turned up to the appointment appearing masc. At the same time I had a series of written and oral interrogations into just why I thought I wanted to be a woman, my sexual history, etc etc. At every stage they openly expressed doubt as to the truth of what I was saying. It was humiliating and exhausting, but it’s done now.
Wow, that really sucks. :(
I was able to get a referral letter in Tokyo for SRS after only a few appointments, but the surgery is abroad so that might explain why it was somewhat easy: still had to tell my little life story to the psychologist, but he was never expressing doubt like in your case…Ooh, lucky! I guess you went to a better clinic than me then :)
(I only found out afterwards that mine was a bit notorious for being stuck in the past)
Maybe the “gaijin” factor helped…
Holy shit this is so expensive. I was planning on moving to Korea soon and wanted to stop wasting time and money on laser, so I was looking at doing trips to Japan for electrolysis (at least on my face. I’m fine with the progress of laser elsewhere) but that is an absurd amount of money.
I’d have thought Korea might well be cheaper than here, although I haven’t checked. There are just so few places offering it and they’re always fully booked so they just keep on raising the price.
As far as I can tell after some intensive web-searching, the laser is relatively inexpensive, but there are virtually no electrolysis places that I can find.
I wouldn’t be so opposed to laser, but my genetics have screwed me with deeply rooted, ultra thick, dense hair, so laser is excruciating in order for it to work. Like, if it’s tolerable, I see zero results. The only time it’s worked is when I was in so much pain, I literally filled the little goggles they give with tears and was like dissociating on the table. Even after half a dozen sessions of that, I’ve got like easily 3 or 4 times more than that to go, so I’d rather just jump to electrolysis so that there’s measurable progress each time at least.
That sounds miserable about the heavy-booking, though. Maybe I’ll just keep my eyes open for openings and save a bit of money in the meantime. 😭
Damn girl that’s a lot… I wish you all the best!
If you don’t mind, what is the long footnote? Boiled down to a few key points, or in full I read either :) I’d wager a guess, bureaucracy, stupid hurdles and half baked laws?
Quick edit, is the footnote also why you use DIY or is it the only option for you?
Thanks! It’s not that long, and you pretty much guessed it :)
So, surprisingly, SRS is covered by the national health insurance (at certified hospitals) as a treatment for GID. But of course, it’s not that easy, and in order to book the surgery you need approval from a “gender committee”, which is an excruciating combination of waiting, and dancing to the tune of gatekeeper psychiatrists (so, what do you think of when you masturbate?)
Anyway, one of the conditions to even start the approval process is a year of hormone therapy. And, guess what? Cross-gender hormone therapy is not covered by insurance. I can get as much testosterone as I want, though! The law says that you’re not allowed to mix approved and unapproved treatments for the same condition, and so – tada! – you have to pay full price for surgery. I can’t think of any way you could ever use insurance for it, unless there was some pre-existing medical reason you couldn’t take HRT and you somehow managed to convince the committee that you still wanted to go ahead.
DIY was just at the beginning, because I had to wait several months to get my initial diagnosis, and even then the first clinic I went to only offered weekly E.V. injections, so I was crashing out by day 6 or so every week. Fortunately I’m on patches now.
Thanks for sharing all that, that’s super interesting. I hope you don’t mind is I ask a few questions. I don’t know anything about healthcare in Japan, if and what is public, and what is private.
When you talk about insurance, do you mean a private health insurance that you pay for?
And are those 70% you mention at the end also from a private health insurance?
I love questions!
There’s a national health insurance and pension system in Japan that everyone is required to join (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but never mind). The fees are based on your previous year’s income.
Most clinics and hospitals accept this insurance, and for most people it covers 70% of the cost of healthcare (more in certain cases). Prices are set by the government as a condition of participating. There’s a maximum out-of-pocket limit too, so you’re covered if you have a long hospital stay or whatever.
However, only approved treatments can be used under this scheme, and cosmetic, experimental, and off-label treatments aren’t covered. Some clinics specializing in these don’t bother joining the system and set their own prices.
You can get private insurance as well, of course, but there’s not much point.
Thank you for the clarification! I wasn’t sure whether Japan mostly operated on a public healthcare like in the EU or private healthcare like in the US.
It’s a topic I find super interesting and Universal Healthcare is under attack by neoliberals and other right wing political actors about everywhere it’s been enacted like my own country, France. So it is very interesting to learn about how it work in other places.
