Hi, I'm Anna. I'm 24 years old. I live in central Illinois. I have been dealing with severe gender dysphoria since I was 13 years old - I’ve had an overwhelming awareness that my body is not the way it should be, and this disconnect and distress is a constant factor in my daily life. I began living as a woman and medically transitioning in 2020, which has helped a lot so far, but some of the fundamental causes of distress haven’t gone away.

I'm making this fundraiser to ask for help paying for SRS, to help bring my body into alignment with my self-image and allow me to live my life as myself. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to who’s done this has said that the outcome was life-changing.

Costs and due dates

I chose to go with Dr. Prae at the Suporn Clinic in Chonburi, Thailand, known for being affordable compared to US surgeons while producing some of the world's best functional and aesthetic results. They use a lottery system for new patients: they open up their calendar once every three months, you send them your preferences by email, and you find out some days later whether you got a slot. I was very lucky and got assigned a surgery date on my second attempt.

The surgery fee is 600,000 THB, or 18,600 USD at current conversion rates. This includes all medical costs while at the clinic and hospital, and covers transportation from the airport to the clinic and back. (Similar procedures with US-based surgeons are around five times as expensive.)

Separately, I’ll need to pay for food, flights there and back, and the hotel room (around $40/night). A friend offered to come with me as support, so the hotel cost might end up being split between us, but she’s not certain about it.

I took out a loan to pay the 20% deposit for reserving a surgery date (120,000 THB, around $3,700). The clinic needs the rest of the payment (480,000 THB, around $14,900) by 2025-12-07, 1 month before the surgery date. I’ll also need to have plane tickets by that time so the clinic can schedule an airport pickup.

The rest of the funds will be used to cover unforeseen costs while I’m traveling, expenses like food and rent during the time that I’ll be unable to work, equipment and supplies for recovery, etc.

Why I’m posting this so late

For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with various physical and mental health issues (I talk about this more below). Things have improved a lot and I have better ways of coping with the issues that remain, but it’s still very difficult to do things, made more challenging by the lack of structure and routine in my day-to-day life. I’ve had a draft of this fundraiser in progress since late September, but it’s taken me a long time to write and edit this description.

Why I’m asking for help

I haven’t been able to find consistent employment since 2022, when my last position ended and I moved from Seattle to my current location. Besides occasional contract work and food delivery, I’ve been living off dwindling savings, and I’ve been lucky enough to have some limited support from my family, though they’re in a bad financial situation and want nothing to do with my transition.

One reason for this is the layoffs and hiring freezes in my field, software engineering. Right now, I live in an area without many opportunities for employment - I’m planning to move closer to a major city in late 2026, once my lease expires in August. My location practically limits me to remote jobs, for which there’s stiff competition - hundreds of thousands of recently-laid-off engineers.

I'm actively looking for jobs right now, and I’ve found some possible opportunities by asking people I know for referrals, but even if I do end up employed soon, I won't be able to have the funds until long after the payments are due. I’m also unable to take out loans because my current financial situation is already overextended.

Another reason is the health problems that I’ve been dealing with. The best way I have to illustrate them is this excerpt from something I wrote a while ago:

Around this point, the collective stress and trauma from the decades I'd spent in a hostile environment had begun to crash down on me. My environment was better for me than it had ever been, but my mental state declined very quickly. I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and paid out-of-pocket to be evaluated for ADHD - after I pulled my medical records from my school and the pediatrician I'd had as a child, I found out that I'd been diagnosed with ADHD and ASD at ages 5 and 3, but was never told about this, because according to my parents, I'd gotten over it (I hadn't.)

I continued living in the place I'd moved for college, but ended up dropping out due to declining mental and physical health. I had ended up in a year-long cult-like abusive relationship, learned that my chronic pain had to do with joint hypermobility and an undiagnosed connective tissue disorder, and, despite my precautions, contracted COVID multiple times, ending up with long-lasting symptoms including brain fog, exhaustion, chronic fatigue. This compounded onto the general state of burnout and depression and left me in a very bad place, especially after losing so many friends who’d sided with my abuser. I don't remember much of late 2022, early 2023.

In early 2024, someone close to me became severely disabled, and I spent much of my time caring for her, helping her eat, drink, get to medical appointments, etc. She slowly started to recover, especially after getting a wheelchair to help her with daily activities; we moved into a new apartment to be in a wheelchair-accessible building.

Everything combined into a perfect storm of sorts, compounding burnout on top of burnout into a vicious cycle, which the dysphoria made worse at every stage.

I’ve had a lot of recovery and progress in my life since then. I have a lot of hope that over the next couple of years, my life will continue to get better, especially if I’m able to find a job that uses my skills and go through with my planned move. And I know it’ll help more than anything to inhabit a body that feels more like my own.