Hi, my name is Sunny! I'm a 21 year old trans woman from Wyoming living near Pittsburgh currently. I'm a professional CNC machinist, and I'm working 10 hours a day operating Swiss lathes alongside a second 8 hour day job on weekends on a paving crew. I'm currently closeted as I've been chronically homeless since my father rejected me for my gender identity as a woman, and my shelter inside of my supervisor's unheated shed is contingent on my appealing to his conservative worldview.

I'm raising money in an attempt to leave the United States for Australia, to live and work there as a machinist. The country recently had a landslide rejection of conservative/fascist ideals in their most recent election, and much of their trade labor is imported. These laborers have much greater protections and freedoms compared to the American practice of importing unprotected labor from Mexico, which I am intimately familiar with as going to high school as a half Mexican woman in a predominantly Mexican community in Idaho.

$7,000 USD is $10,777 in Australian dollars, and will go towards my travel costs, housing, tools, costs of living, and potentially a used vehicle for transportation while I begin employment in a machine shop in New South Wales. In the meantime, I will continue working hard at my current jobs to give myself the best chance at a new life where I can be open about my gender identity, and hopefully achieve my aspirations of opening my own machine shop someday!

My goal is to be in Australia before the new year 2026 and BOTH housed and employed in the country.

A little bit about me if you're interested;

Machinery is my passion, and my dream as a child was to become a mechanical engineer. Due to my upbringing in poverty split between the oilfields of Wyoming and the Treasure Valley of Idaho, I was only able to afford two semesters of engineering college. These semesters were also troubled by my struggles with mental health in the form of undiagnosed schizoaffective disorder at the time.

Fortunately I was given the opportunity to go to a CNC machining trade school for free through a government program. But to do it I had to go cross country in my 2002 Volkswagen Beetle. I did my best to repair the 270k mile beater, and left my roustabout job in Moorcroft and everything I ever knew out west to take it cross country. I stayed with many friends I met through LGBT online communities, spent many nights traveling under the stars and northern lights, days sleeping in truckstop parking lots, and repairing the vehicle whenever and wherever it happened to break down all the way to Virginia over a period of 2 weeks. After an engine component proved to be more expensive than I planned, I had nearly no money to live on for the 4 months of my trade school.

But despite the hard, hungry winter, I graduated and took the last of my money to drive to the job offer I got in Pennsylvania, thinking it may be more LGBT friendly. But the area I ended up living in is incredibly conservative, and I'm regularly privy to bigoted, transphobic and homophobic rhetoric that is miserable to live around in secret. I have continued to be closeted both in gender and with my mental health diagnosis in order to allow myself community living opportunities and prevent harassment at work.

I love language, history, and stories as well as machinery and tech! The Afro-Asiatic languages are an endless source of fascination for me, and I'm working on translations for classical literature written in Arabic. A hobby of mine is reading translations of various world literary and poetic works, such as Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, translations of South American tribal oral traditions, the Conference of the Birds (by Farid Ud-din Attar, not the YA novel >w<), and a cornucopia of others! Currently I'm reading through Sholeh Wolpe's translation of "The Conference of the Birds".

Thanks for reading, and anything helps <3