What does MTF mean?

By Nick Peplow·Gender-affirming surgery coordinator

Last reviewed 26 September 2026· How this site is researched

MTF stands for male to female. It describes a person who was assigned male at birth and is a woman, or is moving towards living as one. Day to day it is shorthand for a trans woman, and it is the term this site is named after, because MTF surgery is how most people search for the operations covered here.

You will see it as MTF, MtF and M2F. Same meaning each time. MTF is the spelling surgeons, clinics and search engines settle on.

What "male to female" is actually saying

The phrase describes a direction of travel. "Male" is the sex recorded at birth; "female" is where the person is heading, or where she already lives. No surgery is required to be MTF, and neither is oestrogen. Some trans women never have an operation, and nothing about that makes them less of a woman.

Used loosely, the term stretches across a wide group:

• Trans women years into transition, socially and medically
• Trans women at the start, or still working out whether to start
• Transfeminine people who do not call themselves women exactly, but are moving in a feminine direction
• Some non-binary people who use MTF in clinics and on forms, because it tells a surgeon in two letters what their body started with

Medicine leans on it for that last reason. It is blunt but informative about anatomy and about what a treatment is aimed at, which is why it turns up in surgeon listings, insurance paperwork, NHS referral letters and journal papers long after the community began drifting away from it.

Where the term came from

MTF grew out of clinical writing in the middle of the twentieth century, when "transsexual" was the standard label and doctors wanted a short way to record which direction a patient was going. Its mirror is FTM, female to male. Trans people picked both terms up because they were compact and everybody understood them, and for a couple of decades they were simply what you said.

Why plenty of people have stopped using it

The objection is straightforward. "Male to female" puts male first, and for a woman who has never once felt male, reading her own life as a journey out of manhood grates. It also smuggles in the idea that womanhood is a destination you reach by completing medical steps, rather than something that was already true before any of it started.

So the vocabulary has moved:

• Trans woman: a woman who is trans. Two words, with woman as the noun. This is the everyday term now.
• Transfeminine or transfem: wider. Includes trans women, and also people heading in a feminine direction who do not use "woman" for themselves.
• AMAB: assigned male at birth. Describes the starting point and claims nothing about identity. Common in medical and community writing.
• Woman, with nothing attached, which is what a lot of trans women want after the transition years are behind them.

I still use MTF on this site, and I want to be honest about why. It is what people type into a search bar at two in the morning, and it is what the operations are called on the clinic websites they land on. That is a practical reason, not a principled one. In person the rule is easier than the argument: call people what they have asked to be called.

Words you will see standing next to it

• FTM: female to male. A trans man, or somebody transitioning that way.
• AFAB: assigned female at birth. The counterpart to AMAB.
• Cis or cisgender: a person whose gender lines up with the sex recorded at birth. Not trans.
• Non-binary: a person whose gender is not simply man or woman. Some have MTF surgeries and some have none.
• Transition: the work of moving into living as yourself. Social (name, pronouns, presentation), legal (documents), medical (hormones, surgery), or any combination.
• GRS, SRS, GCS, GAS: gender reassignment, sex reassignment, gender confirmation and gender-affirming surgery. Four acronyms, roughly one meaning. GAS is the current preference in medicine, and older clinics still use the older ones.
• FFS: facial feminisation surgery. See facial feminization.
• Bottom surgery and top surgery: the broad groupings. Bottom surgery covers orchiectomy, vaginoplasty and vulvoplasty; on this side, chest work means breast augmentation.

Other things MTF stands for

Away from trans and medical writing, the letters belong to other people too, and your search results will show it:

• More than friends, in relationship threads and dating slang.
• Medical Treatment Facility, standard US military usage. A hospital or clinic on a base.
• Multilateral Trading Facility, a European financial-regulation term for a type of trading venue.
• Mobile Task Force, from the SCP Foundation fiction wiki, which is why some results are about containment breaches.
• Assorted company and product names.

Context sorts it out in a second. Sitting next to words like oestrogen, vaginoplasty or voice surgery, it means male to female.

Using it in a sentence

• "She's MTF and had her FFS in Bangkok."
• "The clinic does MTF and FTM procedures."
• "I'm looking for an MTF surgeon who takes insurance."
• "I'm a trans woman" carries the same information, and is what most people would rather hear said about them.

Where to go next

If you are MTF yourself and starting to think about surgery, the start here guide lays out what the options are, the order they tend to happen in, and why the waiting has less to do with theatre lists than you would expect. If you are reading this because somebody you love is MTF, that page is also the quickest way to understand what she is weighing up. More on who I am and why I write this is on the about page.