Estelle's Trans Medical Needs

Estelle is a poet, essayist, musician, trans woman, and former educator who has struggled to find work, housing, and food for over a year. After Estelle lost her two jobs in 2017, friends and family urged her to seek employment so she could afford to take care of her health issues. Sadly, the reality is that her many health issues prevent her from obtaining and keeping employment. Estelle moved to Kansas City in April, hoping a more vibrant city that seemed full of opportunity would help her advance her life, but what she's found so far is disappointment, frustration, services that don't provide, some services that do, and now, as of next month, homelessness.  She needs help to get out of this increasingly hopeless situation.

Estelle has been living with a hormone deficiency since last October. Her current hormone regimen, while better than nothing, is simply inadequate. Estelle has not had access to stable medical care in almost a year, but she knows she has felt better when her estrogen levels were higher than they were the last time she did labs in February. Her current levels are too low to provide her the vitality and stability needed to function on a daily basis. She could not fulfill the labor agreement she made with her current landlady and she will be evicted next month.

Her voice calls attention to her transgender status whenever she speaks, and her beard calls attention to her transness whenever someone looks at her face. As such, she encounters transphobia whenever she leaves her house, including during the hiring process, which would be avoidable if she were further along in her transition (or if insurance companies covered hair removal for trans people, but they don't). The inability to be gendered affirmingly asa normal part of everyday life further erodes her mental health. These aspects of her body prevent Estelle from having the basic confidence and sense of safety that used to provide her enough resilience to take on unfulfilling yet paying jobs, and makes jobs that used to be easy and approachable now out of reach.

A brief history of Estelle's attempts to find work in the last year appears on her Facebook page:

"I had a panic attack my first day on the job at the sex toy shop because the throat numbing spray triggered me and I spent the rest of the day hiding behind the counter. The liquor store stopped returning my calls for an undisclosed reason after saying they'd hire me (transphobia, maybe? nobody ever did that to me when I was pretending to be a boy). I got caught up and was choking back tears during my interview at the bookstore because talking about why I quit teaching brought me too close to the flame and I caught fire. I passed on the video game retail store and the tea shop partly because they offered me next to fucking nothing but also because I didn't want to be miserable managing customer randos and being constantly confronted with the reality of my nonpassing body. I was hired to score SATs again at Pearson last autumn, but I would log in and stare at the screen, unable to comprehend what was going on in front of me enough to score anything, too drained and depleted to do much on days I could focus enough to score, the brain fog was so bad, so they stopped assigning me to scoring projects and I lost the job. As a freelancer, I got lucky that the project deadlines kept moving back because other people on the project were struggling to make deadlines too. It's making sense now. I've had half a year of trying to find work in Kansas City, three months of looking in earnest. The biggest roadblocks are all transition and related. I've been putting the cart before the horse by trying to find work before taking care of my health."

Though she is highly qualified to work in specialized fields as a writer, editor, proofreader, copywriter, teacher, and the like, and though her education and professional experience have the potential to give her access to a living wage with benefits, Estelle hasn't been able to perform at the level she is capable of due to her health. So now, rather than hoping to land a job somewhere so she can later take care of her health problems, Estelle is attempting to take care of her health problems SO SHE CAN FIND WORK.

Estelle needs to immediately address three transition-related aspects of her health. 

1) Electrolysis to finish removing her beard, so she is safer in public places and can more effectively take control of her appearance as a woman. 
2) Voice lessons so she can gain confidence speaking in public and interacting with other people once more, and to help her avoid getting outed by something as simple as talking.
3) Estrogen injections and possibly increased progesterone intake. She will need to see a local endocrinologist for this, run labs a few times, learn to perform injections on herself, and adjust to her new medication. 

Despite knowing what she needs to address, Estelle is feeding herself with food stamps and can't afford to take on any of this. Electrolysis can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on the provider's rates and how the body responds to treatment. Estelle has found one place that charges $30 for an half hour, but she won't know how much she needs until seeing the results after the first session. One voice therapist a trans friend recommended charges $220 for four one-hour sessions and recommends eight sessions to start, but again, there's no telling how long Estelle will need treatment for. Estelle currently has access to endocrinology services from an affordable clinic with an affordable pharmacy (but with doctors who don't' always listen to her and whom she has to fight with to obtain the care she needs); however, the clinic is in St Louis, so she cannot readily access it while staying in Kansas City, if that's where she ends up after she loses her room next month, just in time for Christmas.

Estelle is asking for $1000 to help her get started on these necessary medical treatments. Roughly half of that would go to voice therapy, roughly half would go to hair removal, and the rest to hormones. Even if she found work, insurance would not cover voice therapy or hair removal, so she would need to ask for help even if she were fully employed right now. 

Anything you can give to help Estelle overcome her health issues and function in society again is enormously appreciated. Thank you so much for whatever you can do.