THE RUNDOWN
- Hunter Schafer revealed she had a gender-affirming surgery in her ELLE cover story.
- “I just had bottom surgery in December, which was amazing, and I love it so much,” she said.
- She explained how she came to the decision to have it and detailed her view of queerness more broadly.
In her ELLE cover story, Hunter Schafer revealed she had a gender-affirming surgery last year. “Maybe it’s a good thing to share, for the tension I was talking about between those two worlds [reality and ideology],” she said. “I just had bottom surgery in December, which was amazing, and I love it so much.”
Bottom surgery is a gender-affirming operation that changes a person’s genitals to better align with their gender identity. Schafer, a woman who was assigned male at birth, detailed what led to her decision to have it.
She opened up about queerness generally, saying “the magical thing” about it is that “on an ideological level, it’s about possibility and expansion and growth, and being on that journey and finding yourself.”
She then expanded on her view of her gender identity, saying that while it was expansive for years, it’s “flatter” now. “I’m a woman. I’m a girl,” she said, adding that she reached that point after wrestling with queerness as an idea and philosophy “versus how it applies and works in real life, in the context of the world that we’re living in. I feel like there’s always a tension there.”
Her decision to medically transition reflected her greater journey. “Like I said, for a long time I’ve embraced the gender-expansive part of myself, and I really wanted to try to make that previous body work, because I thought there was something really cool and badass about it,” she said.
As she recovered from the surgery, family and friends came to visit her in the apartment she rented, where she rested. “I think my limit was 150 steps per day, which is nothing,” she said.
Read Schafer’s full cover story here.