Hey there! My name is Max and I'm FTM transgender. I could really use your help with raising money to put towards my top surgery, a medical procedure that will reshape my chest to a flatter, more male-like appearance. This will help me to feel more at home within my own body which right now feels incredibly alien to me. Additionally, this coming spring I will be spending quite a lot of hours in the desert sun doing fieldwork as I begin to collect data for my doctoral work on desert tortoise conservation. I'm really looking forward to it, but without top surgery I'll either have to wear a binder (if anyone isn't familiar with this, a binder is a special tanktop-like shirt that fits really tightly and can get really hot, so not the sort of thing you want to be wearing in the desert), or just not bind and figure out if I can deal with the crushing dysphoria I experience anytime I'm not binding (which happens even within the privacy of my own home). My mind has a hard time even processing the latter as an actual option and I discovered over the course of this summer that wearing a binder while doing fieldwork for hours at a time in the desert is pretty disgusting and extremely uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of being painful. I am so excited to be pursuing my passion for biology, ecology, and conserving reptiles and amphibians and I'd really love it if I could just focus on getting the most out of my education and research experience without the emotional burden of dysphoria and any physical risks that might come with binding while doing field research under the desert sun.

If you can't donate, no problem! But please do consider passing along my message as I can use all the help I can get with this.