Help Delilah escape her transphobic family

Hi, I'm Sioned and I'm fundraising to help my friend Delilah move out from her transphobic family and community.

(TW: transphobia, suicidal ideation, psychiatric admission)

Delilah lives with her conservative Christian family in a small city in South Africa and works for the family business. She is trans and faces discrimination on a daily basis, both at work and at home. Delilah struggles with her mental health and her family alienates and mistreats her for this, making her mental health even worse. She experiences suicidal thoughts frequently and has been admitted to psychiatric hospital several times but the healthcare system isn't trans inclusive and she feels they can only treat the symptoms and not the causes of her distress.

Delilah is currently on hormone replacement therapy to help with her gender dysphoria, but she has struggled to keep accessing this, being taken off it once before by an openly transphobic doctor. Delilah also has cerebral palsy and autism and she was homeschooled to accommodate her medical care as a child, so she doesn't have a support system of friends in her area. I met Delilah about six years ago as a volunteer on an online crisis messaging site and we have been friends since but she doesn't really have any other consistent positive relationships in her life.

Moving out of the family home is difficult under Delilah's circumstances, as her current salary would not cover the cost of rent, and options for employment outside the family business are very limited. The youth unemployment rate is currently over 60% in South Africa, and combined with Delilah's disability and trans identity, this means she faces significant barriers.

We feel like her best option would be to move to the UK where she could have access to a wide community of queer and disabled people and escape her family. Delilah is already saving towards this goal but without community funding this would take years.

Any donations would be greatly appreciated and could make a huge difference to Delilah's life.