a procedureTop surgery

Breast tissue is removed and the chest is reshaped to a male contour. Where the breasts are small and the skin elastic, the work is done through the areola and the nipple stays attached; where they are larger, the skin envelope is cut away in a horizontal ellipse and the nipples are taken off, resized and replaced as grafts. Liposuction is often added at the sides. Drains come out in days, stitches in about a week, and the scars are permanent and visible.

This is the cheapest and commonest operation in the gender-affirming set, and it is the one that travels most easily: one general anaesthetic, a night or two on a ward, and a flight home inside a fortnight.

Three countries publish a price for it and the three documents are not the same kind of thing. Yanhee Hospital in Bangkok lists a mastectomy at 111,000 baht with two nights, an inverted-T or inframammary version at 131,000, a nipple graft at 24,000 on top, and a surcharge of 25,500 where the patient weighs more than 70 kilogrammes — a table, priced by technique and by body, with no inclusion list at all. The London Transgender Clinic gives guide prices from £8,915 for the periareolar technique, £9,365 for double excision with free nipple graft and £12,415 with liposuction, every line reading "Starts from". The Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco separates the surgeon's fee, at 8,500 to 11,500 dollars, from the whole, which it estimates at 14,000 to 17,000 dollars for a cash-paying patient, and adds a pathology charge it puts at 600 dollars.

Inference — that third page is the useful one for reading the other two, because it shows where the missing money sits. A surgeon's fee is not a price. Facility and anaesthesia are quoted case by case, the laboratory that examines the removed tissue bills separately, and a list that quotes one of those three is quoting a third of a bill.

The same Bangkok table prices a different operation a few sections away. Under male breast reduction — gynaecomastia surgery, done on men with enlarged breast tissue — a mastectomy is 71,000 baht with one night, against 111,000 with two. The operation on the table is not identical, but the distance between those two rows is worth noticing on a page about what things cost.

What sends people abroad for it is cost, waiting, and whether the system at home offers the operation to them at all. The last of those is administrative and legal and sits on this directory's gender-affirming care access page.

General anaesthesia, two to three hours, and a stay published as two nights on the Thai table and two to five nights on another Bangkok hospital's page depending on technique. That hospital also publishes the tail: sutures out at seven days, back to work after two weeks, full healing at four to six months. Compression binders are worn for weeks. The parts that need a clinician after the flight home are drain management where drains are still in, the nipple grafts, and haematoma, which declares itself early and needs a theatre.

As of 17 September 2026 the published prices read for this record run from 111,000 baht in Bangkok to 14,000-17,000 dollars in San Francisco, and the three pages disagree about what a price is: a table with nights attached, a guide price that starts from, and an estimate with the surgeon's fee itemised out of it. Nothing read for this record publishes what the revision rate is, and one of the three publishes what a revision costs.

This page describes an operation. It is not advice about whether to have one, or where.