Move a disabled trans person from poverty to PhD.

The Ides of February could change my life.

If I can pay the balance of my student debt by the middle of February, my transcripts will be available — just in time to apply for fully funded and subsidized PhDs with universities where my research and writing are a stunningly perfect match.

Every love story has an obstacle. Here’s mine. The application deadline is the end of February, and I have the experience they want, the research skills and interests, the dream of a proposal, the creative writing sample, the academic writing sample, the grades, and the references — but not the transcripts. My old university won’t release my transcripts until I pay the balance of my debt. There’s a wall in the love story, and it has six thousand bricks in the shape of US dollars. In this tale, I don’t know whether I’m Pyramus or Thisbe, but this version (unlike theirs) can have a happy ending.

The new universities want transcripts. The old university wants US$6,100. I have nothing.

Recent cutbacks in arts education put an end to teaching artist work. This is the first year since before the lockdowns that I have not had a residency (teaching artist placement), and I am living on the edge. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 26%. Factor in being trans, and the numbers grow higher — not in my communities’ favor. Landing new gigs is a Sisyphean task. Subsisting on the rim of poverty in a culture that doesn’t want you is exhausting. So is reinventing yourself in a new field of labor every time an old one disappears. Autism, ADHD, and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder do not decrease the challenge.

The other day, instead of delivering job leads, the search engine brought up a list of fully funded creative writing PhDs. Departmental research interests meshed with mine: the history of queerness and disability, Othering, Early Modern gender and sexuality, and Shakespeare — my era and my fields. If it’s rare to find a perfect match, it’s rarer still to be one.

For the past two years, I’ve traded the whole of my free time for doing research for a queer young-adult backstory to Romeo and Juliet. It’s a good bargain. The novel takes contemporary issues (queerness, racism, masculinity and violence, misogyny, and trauma) and sets them at a temporal distance, so teens can consider their problems in a relatively safe space. As a nonbinary disabled writer and arts educator who works with adolescents, most of whom are dealing with some form of trauma, I know what kind of difference this book could make.

There’s money for academic research, but there’s almost nothing for fiction writers. What there is tends to go to award-winners, who have established track records and healthy bank accounts. The rest of us (unfunded researchers) work, do research, write, and work, and catch sleep when we can. From the outside, creativity can look enviable. From the inside, where the struggle for food and shelter includes feeding and sheltering art, the view is harder.

Countless disabled people exist in poverty cycles. Living on a perpetually spinning hamster wheel is exhausting. Having my work supported and basics — roof, walls, foodstuffs — covered whilst working towards an income-generating degree would be transformative.

For one unemployed, trans, disabled writer and arts educator, $6,100 is a fortune — and that debt must be paid by mid-February, so the transcripts — the last part of my application — can arrive in time. If I could do this my own, I would. I can’t. When many people contribute, that story changes, and so does mine.

A fully funded PhD would support researching and writing the book. Of equal importance, it would change my life.

The goal is US$6,300 because official transcripts come at a price, and because GoFundMe survives on fees (2.9% plus thirty cents from each transaction); there’s no sense in setting an aim that’s short of its purpose. $6,100 buys my future; $200 keeps GoFundMe funding others. If we rise above that, then the rest will go towards moving expenses. (International moving is expensive… not only in terms of cash.)

With your help, I would move from cliff edge to safe harbor, gain long-term stability, and write a book that could change teens’ lives. Asking for help is hard. It’s the last part — bettering young readers’ lives — that takes it to this side of tolerable. Give me a boost, and I promise that, through work and teaching, I’ll lift others, too.