
"Denver Health’s mission is Level One Care for All, and the organization realized we could do better to serve the LGBTQ population of Denver. The LGBT Center of Excellence at Denver Health, which opened in 2017, will begin to offer facial feminization surgery this summer, making Denver Health one of only three public hospitals in the nation to offer it, according to Trans Health Care's surgeon directory. Although the surgery is well known within the transgender community, it is not yet widely available. But that’s changing, and Colorado will be at the forefront of the surgery's newfound popularity. Hoskins’s next step in transition is to undergo facial feminization surgery, a procedure she says she's wanted since before coming out. Hormones helped to redistribute the fat in her face to make it look more feminine, but she knew that the bones in her face had already developed and that it was “rough and masculine.”

It wasn’t just her body hair, the clothing she wore, or her sexual organs that Hoskins was concerned about it was the bone structure of her face. She feared that even if she started dressing and introducing herself as a woman, people would see her as a “man in a dress.” She wanted to like who she saw when she looked in the mirror. While living as a man, Hoskins had a beard so thick that it was impossible to shave every day. But the emotional stress of the change was worth it, she says, for the sense of freedom she finally felt.īut in order to really feel like herself, she needed to change her appearance. She had to change her name, her birth certificate and her driver's license. She lost a good job at a software company - she presumes because she is transgender. Her marriage ended, though her wife and kids remain supportive. Most of her family, who are deeply religious, stopped talking to her completely.

Two years ago, when Stacia Hoskins came out as transgender at age thirty, her entire life was upended.
