Help Leigh be the most Leigh! (Top Surgery Fund)

Hello Friends <3

As some of you know, or have seen, I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 or 7 years trying to squirrel out my gender identity. I changed my legal name to be more gender-neutral in 2013, and you may have seen posts from me about my changing physical, and emotional, experience.

I don’t think I’ve ever really identified as a woman - I feel like I’ve tried pretty hard, but it always felt extremely disingenuous. [My mother will attest to the ‘cleavage years’] I’ve gone through phases of highly performative femininity (oh god, and those 3 years of long hair) and trying to embrace that angle, and it always feels wrong. So I’ve spent a lot of the last decade trying to figure out what my gender means to me.

Unfortunately, where I’ve settled leaves me in sort of a bind (pun intended) so to speak. Non-binary is the best fit for me. I really just want to exist as a person outside of what I feel are socially damaging structures for gender identity. I don’t want to be a man or a woman - I just want to be -me- — and that seems punishingly difficult to do in this day and age.

So what does it mean to be me? In my brain, I feel great about me. I am creative and mindful and caring, even if I feel like an entire universe is trying to explode out of my brain on an ongoing basis (hence, my art) it’s such a fundamental part of who I am.

When it gets in to the physical body thing, it gets a lot more shaky. Pragmatism is what I find most important - I wear skirts because they give that excellent leg mobility on the dance floor. I wear running shoes for the same reason. I wear high-neck shirts because… shit - because I fucking hate having breasts.

Two years ago, I started pursuing an OHIP-covered breast reduction. I felt like I had a pretty good case - my breasts have always been large, they fuck up my life (rashes, discomfort, arm numbness) and they didn’t seem to be going away.  I waited 8 months for my referral appointment to the surgeon recommended by my GP. By that time I’d lost 60 pounds, largely due to organic lifestyle changes. I no longer had a good case for OHIP coverage.

Fuck.

I booked anyways, because going in - I knew this was a thing I needed to do regardless. My original surgery date was July 11th, 2018. My current surgery date is June 11th, 2019. I’ve been putting this off for almost a year now.

I started to realize that even my smaller, somewhat less inconvenient breasts… made me really damn unhappy. They don’t feel like an extension of me. When I get dressed and they feel too prominent, I go back and change. When I see myself topless, I grimace. I’ve tried to find minimizing bras, sports bras, anything - and all I come back to is to ‘feel’ right visually, I have to be extremely physically uncomfortable, all-day, every day. Turns out, hating my breasts was always about gender presentation.

So, back to start: Can I get OHIP coverage? Does the Government consider me trans?

The long and short of it: No. I’m not interested in taking testosterone, and 1 year of HRT is required for OHIP covered top surgery. I’m not looking to be more masculine - I am just sick of having to deal with such visibly obvious gender markers all the time. So I don’t fit in to the province’s idea of what ‘gender’ is, or what would qualify as ‘gender confirming’ surgery, so I’m on my own.

Which is why I need your help.

Every time I look at the finances associated with this, I realize I’ve got an impossible decision: I have to give up art, I can give up my unpaid or low-paid volunteer work, I can give up investing my time in communities around me for probably a year in order to pay for the surgery entirely on my own. I have to basically do the heads-down capitalism thing for an extended period of time - and then I’m stuck in an (albeit temporary) situation that makes me feel even less like myself.

That’s why I’m asking for help - because with some additional financial support from my communities, I can afford to keep investing my time back in them - and be the most me. I don’t have to give up a fundamental piece of inner self in order to get rid of a nuisance piece of my outer self. You’d also be giving me something I am absolutely terrible at doing for myself: the time / breathing room to actually sit down and recover after surgery.

It’s really tough asking, though - and I want to make sure I pay it back, or pay it forward, in any way that I can. I want to make myself more available for helping with your projects, to giving you advice about anything I can, to helping you build shit and realize dreams and make your spaces the best they can be. If nothing else, I want supporting me here to be an open invitation to solicit me to do whatever I can to help your dreams come true - because that’s the thing I really love doing, and I’m hoping once I get over these bumps in the…. road, I’ll feel even more capable of doing that.

Also: I picked this extremely nice amount, which is a few thousand dollars under the full cost of the surgery. I still want to be responsible for as much of this as I can, it’s just that the full amount + taking time off to recover from surgery is untenable.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration reading this <3

Love always,
Leigh