In the bright light of a San Francisco operating theatre, a surgeon in blue scrubs, orange clogs and green plastic gloves sits on a stool with his arms folded, his left leg bouncing to the Velvet Underground track on the stereo and his eyes trained on a sedated patient strapped to a trolley whose eyelids he has just stitched shut. Six days ago Olivia was at her desk in Minnesota with colleagues who knew her only as a man. Now Jordan Deschamps-Braly, a doctor with the instincts of a sculptor, is preparing to peel off half of her face so that he can reshape the skull beneath it.
He is slightly nervous, as he needs to be to do this well, yet also itching to