A Plastic Surgery Clinic Founded to Serve the 2SLGBTQIA+ Community
Celebrating your Identity
We Travelled the World So You Don’t Have To
There has always been a lack of providers of gender-affirming surgery in Ontario and Canada, leading many of our trans and gender-diverse siblings to travel to other provinces and other countries to get the care they need. Many of the world’s leading experts in gender-affirming surgery aren’t even in North America, making it financially and logistically difficult for Canadians to access this expertise.
Your care at Catalyst Surgical in Toronto is backed by some of the giants in plastic surgery and gender-affirming surgery. Our surgeon, Dr. Chung, spent seven years travelling to bring back the expertise of world-famous surgeons like:
Dr. Elizabeth Hall-Findlay in Alberta (breast aesthetic surgery and body contouring),
Professor Stan Monstrey in Belgium (top and bottom surgery),
Dr. Hugh Mclean in Toronto (top surgery), Dr. Thomas Satterwhite in San Francisco (facial feminization and body contouring) and,
Drs. Luis Capitan and Daniel Simon at Facialteam in Spain (facial feminization)
to bring it all back to Ontario, Canada for our community.
At Catalyst, your surgical and care team is local, so your follow-up is local—or at the very least, in Canada. You don’t have to travel the world if you can’t or if you don’t want to.
Our Surgical Procedures
Facial Feminization Surgery
The goal of gender-affirming facial surgery is to address the changes (or lack of changes) that occurs during puberty to the facial bone structures of the face as tissues are exposed to pubertal hormones like testosterone or estrogen.
Gender-affirming facial surgery falls into two broad categories: facial feminization and facial masculinization. This is not to suggest that a person who wants to undergo facial feminization must identify as a transwoman, but rather, suggests which bony changes we are trying to address.
Our recommendations are tailored for each individual person. Not all of the available procedures are usually needed nor wanted and where your facial bones are today in terms of shape and development have a lot to do with forming the plan for your process.
More Details
Top Surgery
The most common and popular form of gender affirming body surgery is top surgery – a set of surgeries whose goal is to address the secondary sexual characteristics of the chest that are not congruent with a person’s gender. Broadly and depending on the goals of the patient, they are categories of:
- mastectomy (sometimes referred to as “masculinizing”)
- breast augmentation (sometimes referred to as “feminizing”)
- breast reduction (sometimes referred to as “non-binary” or “not-flat”).
Within each category, there are a few decisions that we help you make to come up with a plan that’s right for you, and how you want to outwardly present your identity.
Following top surgery is gender-affirming body contouring. This set of surgeries tends to focus around the hip, abdominal, buttock and thigh areas, depending on the goals of the patient. Gender-affirming body contouring tends to revolve around changing the contour or silhouette of the patient to better match their gender. The procedures can be additive (where we add tissue to areas, e.g. the buttocks) or subtractive (where we take away tissue, e.g. the hips).
More Details
Cosmetic Procedures
Yes, we do more than gender-affirming surgery here at Catalyst! Our clinic was founded to serve the broader 2SLGBTQIA+ community which includes our trans siblings, but our offerings extend into the larger rainbow community as well.
Our procedures are largely categorized by body area: Face and Body. Our team works with you to find the best solution to help you reach your aesthetic and identity goals. If having a surgeon who is part of our community is an important part of your care, we’d love to meet with you and discuss how we can help.
More DetailsYou/Yours
We’re here for you and your team. One of the challenges of any surgical journey is the legwork that patients do to get things done. Sometimes, this involves patients educating their providers about the care they need and why.
At Catalyst, we want to avoid this as much as possible. We link up with the team you already have around you to ensure that the majority of the legwork is off your shoulders so that you can focus on making the right plan for you and your recovery from surgery. Our team is with you every step of the way, with dedicated and caring staff in every role to ensure that your experience is as smooth as possible because we know that even when everything goes well, recovery from surgery can still be a challenge.
Clinic Announcements
It’s been a long journey, but our location is now secured. We are currently freshening up the place and updating equipment to greet our new and existing clients!
We are accepting limited referrals at this time for top surgery
If you or someone you know is looking for top surgery, please have their gender affirming provider reach out to us at info@catalystsurgical.ca or via our contact form to arrange for orientation.
We Are Accepting All Referrals And Self-Referrals
…for facial affirmation (feminization and masculinization) and for general aesthetic plastic surgery which may or may not be gender affirming in nature.
We are offering provider orientation
…both in-person and virtually to both primary care providers as well as collaborating specialists to our clinic. We highly encourage orientation for providers as we hope to introduce a new team-care model that encourages increased collaboration and access seldom seen in professional specialist relationships. If you are a provider of gender affirming care, please reach out to us at info@catalystsurgical.ca or via our contact form to learn more about our process.