Guillermo Mac Millan (born 1940/1941) is a retired Chilean urologist who worked at Van Buren Hospital in Valparaíso. He carried out

sex reassignment surgery Gender-affirming surgery (GAS) is a surgical procedure, or series of procedures, that alters a person's physical appearance and sexual characteristics to resemble those associated with their gender identity. The phrase is most often associat ...

on hundreds of patients over the course of his career.

Life

Mac Millan studied at the University of Chile, where he participated in heart transplantations led by Jorge Kaplán Meyer. He began practice as a urologist in 1966. In 1976, when Mac Millan was 36 years old, a woman he had operated on for kidney cancer asked him if he could help her daughter, who was a trans woman. Using a modification of an existing technique, Mac Millan performed sex reassignment surgery on the woman's daughter. By the time a year passed, he had performed ten such surgeries, all of them for free. He initially faced criticism from colleagues, who told him that what he was doing was unnatural or immoral. He went on to become the head of Van Buren Hospital's urology department. Between 1976 and 2019, Mac Millan carried out

on 448 to about 700 patients. He had many patients from

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

, where genitoplasty was at one time considered a mutilation punishable by

imprisonment Imprisonment or incarceration is the restraint of a person's liberty for any cause whatsoever, whether by authority of the government, or by a person acting without such authority. In the latter case it is considered " false imprisonment". Impri ...

, including Mariela Muñoz.

Retirement

Mac Millan retired in 2019 at the age of 78. At the time of his retirement, nobody in the area was qualified to replace him. His intended replacement, Melissa Cifuentes, was still studying the specialization and was expected to begin work in September 2020. Van Buren Hospital suspended genitoplasties until that date. The local chapter of MOVILH praised Mac Millan's work and called on the Chilean Ministry of Health to train more professionals in genitoplasty.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mac Millan, Guillermo 1940s births Living people Chilean physicians Urologists Year of birth missing (living people) Date of birth missing (living people)