After a cosmetic surgeon based out of Spokane, Wash. faced media scrutiny for carrying out gender reassignment surgeries on inmates and minors, his website suddenly disappeared. Visitors to StillerAesthetics.com on Friday found a “Page not Found” error instead of the previous advertisements for a range of cosmetic surgeries, one day after The Daily Wire published an article detailing Dr. Geoffrey Stiller’s lucrative gender surgery business at taxpayer expense. The instinct to avoid scrutiny and escape responsibility characterizes both Dr. Stiller’s career and the transgender surgery movement as a whole.

On February 19, The Daily Wire reported that Stiller had “received more than $4.3 million from the Washington State Health Care Authority since July 2019,” including “more than $800,000 in taxpayer funds in 2025 alone.” The Daily Wire asked Stiller about the extent of his business with Washington Department of Corrections but received no response.

However, Washington taxpayers (as well as federal taxpayers, through Medicaid) were not Stiller’s only source of revenue. Stiller’s website offered a variety of surgeries that included many standard cosmetic surgeries, as well gender surgeries. Stiller was also prolific, claiming on his website to have “performed over 1,000 vaginoplasties, averaging 5 procedures a week, making him extremely sought after for MTF [male-to-female] bottom surgery.”

A vaginoplasty is a surgery that amputates a man’s healthy penis and replaces it with a non-functional facsimile of a vagina (using either the penile tissue or the man’s colon tissue). In other words, it’s the type of cosmetic surgery that shouldn’t even exist or be needed. Vaginoplasties entail slow, painful recovery that requires frequent “dilation” of the artificial hole, which may otherwise close as the man’s scarred body seeks to heal itself.

It’s unclear how much Stiller was worth, but divorce records showed several years ago that he and his wife owned five houses plus a timeshare. A former employee recalled Stiller throwing money around liberally to his staff, helping them pay off debts, get expensive dental work, and even buy a house. “He very much has the idea that he can get himself out of anything with money,” she said.

According to a report by Investigate West in 2025, Stiller has been getting out of things for quite a while. Years before getting into gender surgeries, Stiller first hung out his shingle for cosmetic surgeries in North Carolina. But, in 2009, Stiller botched a hair transplant for bodybuilder William Colson, who testified, “my scalp immediately started to die and literally rot within the next few days,” according to court documents. Stiller, who only ever had a year of training in cosmetic surgery, paid $450,000 to Colson in a settlement and relocated to the Pacific Northwest.

As with The Daily Wire, Stiller “did not respond to multiple interview requests” from Investigate West. He tries to avoid critical public scrutiny.

Such scrutiny came knocking for Stiller in 2017. Only two years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage by judicial fiat in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), cosmetic surgeries to alter a person’s apparent sex were still rare, but the growing transgender movement promised to make this field a highly profitable one. Stiller was determined to get in on the ground floor.

Stiller asked to carry out vaginoplasties at Pullman Regional Hospital, a modest hospital with only 25 beds in Pullman Wash., a college town just across the state line from Moscow, Idaho. At the time, the nearest location known to offer gender surgeries was in San Francisco. Soon, what Stiller imagined to be a lucrative business opportunity turned into a major controversy.

When hospital CEO Scott Adams announced to the staff over lunch that the hospital was expanding its surgery offerings to include vaginoplasties, one employee knew he could not participate. Dr. Rod Story publicly opposed the decision, questioning the speed with which it had been made, appealing to the lack of medical support for such transgender surgeries, and pleading for conscience protections for hospital staff who did not want to participate in such an ethically dubious practice.

“As a physician, it crosses a line in the medical ethic to first ‘do no harm,’” Dr. Story told The Washington Stand in a phone interview. “There is no medical or biological basis for the sense that they are misgendered, and then doing a surgery that removes healthy tissue, then participating in telling them that they are a different gender — it crossed a line into a place that we should not go.”

Story, whose colleagues awarded him the Physician Excellence Award in 2017, is not a surgeon, but he often cared for surgical patients and “worked alongside Dr. Stiller very closely” in the small hospital. However, as a Christian, Story fundamentally rejected the idea that a man could become a woman, or a woman could become a man. “As a hospital physician,” Story’s “job was to manage surgery patients, authorize them for surgery,” and other tasks that he would have found impossible to do for patients who were there for a gender surgery.

A brief public comment period brought an avalanche of dissenting opinions. “I never intended to be the main person in opposition, but I was contacted by several newspapers. The hospital was suggesting that I was the best person to seek for comment in opposition,” Story recalled.

In addition, “there were a number of churches in our community that spoke publicly about these concerns,” he added. “First off, why are our small-town hospitals giving their care and concern to this contentious issue?” Churches also raised concerns that the ideology behind the surgeries attacked “what makes a man a man and a woman a woman,” as well as “concerns that this is offered to people as an option that is right and good.”

However, when it came up for a vote, the hospital board unanimously approved allowing Dr. Stiller to carry out vaginoplasties there. Having “no other options at that point,” Story said, “I made the decision to submit my resignation,” effective December 31, 2017. Story had no other job prospects at the time and found it difficult to find one when the “word in the community was I was a ‘bigoted’ doctor.” He eventually opened his own family medicine practice in Moscow.

Despite winning the fight, Stiller did not handle the public conflict well. He coped by avoiding the internet, and he skipped meals, losing 20 pounds from stress, as The Washington Post reported that year. Even after gaining permission, Stiller chose to operate at another small hospital about 10 miles away, Gritman Medical Center, where he had received permission with far less brouhaha.

Perhaps, deep down, the arguments made against the procedures troubled his conscience, a God-given faculty that no amount of money can fully silence.

Several years later, Stiller expanded to Spokane, Wash., where his website said it was “much safer to take care of patients.” However, Stiller Aesthetics still maintains a storefront in Moscow, Idaho between a Crumbl Cookie and a nail salon, and Stiller still carries out surgeries at a nearby hospital in Colfax, Wash., according to Story.

When the Idaho state legislature took action against gender procedures in 2023, Stiller was likely glad that he had relocated the bulk of his business to reliably progressive Washington state. And, according to state financial records, his expansion into the Washington prison system has proven quite the windfall.

However, Stiller still seems to be running from critical scrutiny, as if he knows his practices cannot stand up to much. As it turns out, even his qualifications are questionable. Stiller advertises himself as “board-certified,” but his credential is from the American Board of Cosmetic Surgery, which “requires a year-long fellowship, the completion of 300 cosmetic surgeries, and passing an exam,” according to Investigate West.

By contrast, the American Board of Plastic Surgery, one of 24 boards established by the American Board of Medical Specialties, requires six years of training. In 2022, a study found that surgeons credentialed by the American Board of Cosmetic Surgery were three times as likely to have disciplinary complaints compared to those credentialed by the American Board of Plastic Surgery.

“Make sure your surgeon is certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. Accept no imitations. Don’t fall for fancy titles,” declared C. Bob Basu, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), which recently recommended against gender reassignment surgeries for minors. “In the wild, wild west of cosmetic surgery, sometimes ethics — doing the right thing for your patients — takes a backseat.”

If cosmetic surgery is the wild, wild west, then cosmetic gender surgeries are an even wilder west. Not only do practitioners have very little experience — Stiller’s training in vaginoplasties consisted of a whopping two surgeries supervised by a more experienced surgeon — but the entire industry is based upon little and low-quality evidence. It was the “very low/low certainty of evidence regarding mental health outcomes” and “emerging concerns about potential long-term harms and the irreversible nature of surgical interventions” that led the ASPS to recommend against the procedures for minors.

“This whole thing about hormones and surgery — the fact of the matter is, it never changed my gender,” FRC Senior Fellow Walt Heyer, who lived for eight years as a woman before finding life in Christ, argued on “Washington Watch.” “So, the whole thing is sort of a medical fraud to begin with. … It’s all cosmetic. So I say, I never transitioned. I didn’t ‘detransition’ because it never happened.”

It’s important for doctors to “speak truthfully,” Story insisted. But transgender surgeries are “creating a situation where we have to countermand what we know about what it means to be a man or woman and give care that contradicts who the patient is.” For this reason, the lucrative gender surgery industry cannot withstand much scrutiny. With the disappearance of Dr. Stiller’s website, it seems that gender surgeons cannot withstand much scrutiny either.