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Chest Contouring Surgery for Gender Affirmation Care: A Twitter Analysis
Janina Kueper, Stephen Kisty, Brodie Parent
University of Pittsburgh/UPMC
2022-01-14
Presenter: Janina Kueper
Affidavit:
The resident conceived and designed this study on their own within the confines of a larger transhealth study group currently being started by Dr. Parent. She collected the data using search terms previously compiled by a medical student, Stevie Kisty. She analyzed the data on her own, and interpreted it with the support of Dr. Parent. She wrote the abstract, which was critically revised by Dr. Parent.
Director Name: Vu Nguyen
Author Category: Resident Plastic Surgery
Presentation Category: Clinical
Abstract Category: Breast (Aesthetic and Recon.)
Chest contouring surgery, commonly referred to as 'top surgery', is the most frequentl gender-affirming procedure performed for individuals with a broad variety of gender identifications. Twitter has emerged as a major resource and discussion hub for providers and patients alike. Academic research access to Twitter's Application Programming Interface was obtained. A full archive search from March 2006 to the present of 'top surgery' resulted in 9324 tweets. The majority of users tweeting about the topic were prospective patients. Surgical providers were almost entirely absent from the Twitterscape, with the majority being medically- and not surgically trained. Users averaged 4,541 followers (range: 1-339,073, median: 431) and 16,999 tweets (range: 1-663,204, median: 5,257) to date. Their posts on top surgery received a mean of 1.78 retweets (range: 0-1,440), 0.63 replies (range: 0-187), and 9.3 likes (range: 0-10,187). The most common topics were sharing personal health journeys by patients and prospective patients, discussions about gender identification and the broader LGBTQIA community, and calls for funding and donations in order to obtain chest masculinizing surgery. Sentiment analysis of the tweet content found that the majority of tweets were positive (57.1 %) or neutral (33.7 %) in attitude. Overall, the number of tweets referencing chest masculinization increased progressively from year to year beginning in 2009 (p<0.05). Future studies should seek to understand how the digital landscape affects patient decision making, and query how surgical providers should (or should not) engage with social media.
