What does FTM mean?

By Nick Peplow·Gender-affirming surgery coordinator

Last reviewed 14 September 2026· How this site is researched

FTM stands for female to male. It describes someone who was assigned female at birth and is a man, or is transitioning towards living as one. In everyday use it's shorthand for a trans man, and it's the term this site is built around: FTM surgery means the surgeries trans men and transmasculine people have as part of transition.

You'll see it written FTM, FtM and F2M. They all mean the same thing. FTM is the most common spelling and the one search engines and surgeons use.

What "female to male" actually describes

The phrase is about direction, not a finish line. "Female" is the sex someone was assigned at birth; "male" is where they're going or where they already are. Nobody has to have had any surgery, or be on testosterone, to be FTM. Plenty of trans men never have surgery at all, and they're no less FTM for it.

In practice the term covers a wide group:

• Trans men who have fully socially and medically transitioned
• Trans men early in transition, or before starting anything
• Transmasculine people who don't identify as men exactly, but are moving in a masculine direction
• Some non-binary people who use FTM as a convenient label in medical settings, because it tells a surgeon or a hormone clinic what they need

The medical world uses it a lot because it's precise about what the body started with and what treatment is aimed at. That's why you'll see it in surgeon listings ("FTM top surgery"), in insurance and NHS paperwork, and in research papers, even as it's become less common in the community itself.

Where the term came from

FTM and its mirror, MTF (male to female), grew up in the second half of the twentieth century, when "transsexual" was the standard clinical word and both clinicians and trans people needed a short way to say which direction someone was going.

It was trans men who turned it into a name to organise under. In the late 1980s Lou Sullivan, a San Francisco writer and activist, started a peer support group and newsletter for trans men under the FTM name, and the group later grew into FTM International, for years one of the best-known trans men's organisations. Sullivan had himself been turned away by gender clinics at first because he was attracted to men, and his campaigning helped end the assumption that a trans man had to be straight to qualify for care.

Why some people don't use it

The criticism of FTM is that it centres where you started. Calling someone "female to male" puts "female" first, and for a man who has never felt female, that grates. It can also imply that being a man is a destination you arrive at through medical steps, rather than something you already are.

So a lot of people now say:

• Trans man: a man who is trans. Two words, and man is the noun. This is the most common everyday term.
• Transmasculine or transmasc: broader. Covers trans men and also people who are moving in a masculine direction without identifying as a man.
• AFAB: assigned female at birth. Purely descriptive of the starting point, without saying anything about identity. Common in medical and community writing.
• Man, with no qualifier at all, which is what many trans men prefer once they're through transition.

None of this makes FTM wrong. It's still the term most people search for, it's still what surgeons call the surgery, and many trans men use it about themselves without a second thought. I use it on this site because it's the clearest label for the surgeries. If someone tells you they'd rather you didn't use it about them, that's easy: use whatever they've asked for.

Related terms you'll see next to it

• MTF: male to female. A trans woman, or someone transitioning in that direction.
• AMAB: assigned male at birth. The counterpart to AFAB.
• Cis or cisgender: someone whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Not trans.
• Non-binary: someone whose gender isn't simply man or woman. Some non-binary people have FTM surgeries; some don't.
• Transition: the process of moving to live as your gender. It can be social (name, pronouns, clothes), legal (documents), medical (hormones, surgery), or any mix of the three.
• Top surgery and bottom surgery: the two broad groups of FTM surgery. Top surgery is chest reconstruction. Bottom surgery covers hysterectomy, vaginectomy and genital reconstruction.

What you'll see on paperwork instead

The label on a surgeon's website is rarely the label on the paperwork. Insurance policies, hospital consent forms and letters of support name the operation, not the person: "bilateral mastectomy with chest reconstruction" rather than "FTM top surgery", "phalloplasty with urethral lengthening" rather than "FTM bottom surgery". Diagnosis codes don't say FTM either. They say gender dysphoria (the DSM-5 term, used in the US) or gender incongruence (the ICD-11 term, used in most other places); the dysphoria entry explains the difference.

That matters when you are reading an insurance policy, because a search for "FTM" can come up empty on a document that covers everything you need. Search for the procedure names instead. It also matters for letters, where naming the exact operation is what gets them accepted; letters of support covers why.

In Bangkok, where I have spent the last decade coordinating patients, hospitals use FTM freely in package names and price lists, often alongside SRS (sex reassignment surgery), an older term many Thai hospitals still use for genital surgery. If you are comparing quotes from abroad, expect the older vocabulary and don't read anything into it.

Other things FTM can stand for

Outside trans and medical contexts, FTM has other meanings, and you'll trip over them in search results:

• First-time mum / first-time mom: very common in parenting forums and baby groups. If a post says "FTM here, 32 weeks", it's about pregnancy, not transition.
• First to market: business and product jargon.

Context usually makes it obvious. On a surgeon's website or anywhere near the words "top surgery" or "testosterone", it means female to male.

How it's used in a sentence

• "He's FTM and had top surgery last year."
• "The clinic does FTM and MTF procedures."
• "I'm looking for an FTM surgeon in the UK."
• "I'm a trans man" says the same thing without the acronym, and is what many people would rather hear.

Where to go from here

If you're here because you're FTM yourself and thinking about surgery, the start here page walks through what the options are, roughly what order people have them in, and what to read first. If you're here because someone you care about is FTM, the same page is a good place to understand what they might be weighing up.