Help Melanie obtain trans healthcare!

Hello, all! My name is Melanie. I love cats, movies, and peace and love and good happiness stuff - and I'm trans.

I could tell you my life story easily enough, but let's just be upfront: I ideally need at least about $19,000 to pursue all the services that I need while still being able to pay bills and support myself.

I'm very fortunate to have benefits through my current job, and a support system of friends and family at home, that will allow me to pursue the surgeries I need at less absolute cost than could be true otherwise. That hardly means my circumstances are perfect, though. My health insurance still has a hefty "yearly out of pocket maximum" to the tune of $5,000 that falls to me to resolve, and even as I've done my best to save up, it would take almost everything I have available to me as I speak to pay it outright. Meanwhile, short-term disability insurance through my employer should cover monthly bills during my recovery - but only just barely, leaving me nothing in the event of an emergency of any kind. A cushion of any less than a few thousand dollars could evaporate with one bad day. (And suffice to say, that's a drastically low approximation along the lines of "bare minimum and still all too realistically not enough" - but I'm grasping at straws as it is.)

And that's just the easy stuff. Bottom surgery, top surgery - health insurance coverage is a boon, a privilege (...should be a universal human right...) I absolutely recognize. Facial feminization surgery - well, in a perfect world there would be coverage for that without question, but in this one, for me, there's not. If I pursue FFS at the same time as top & bottom surgery it will certainly reduce the overall cost to me, but we're still talking a significant amount of money I just don't have to readily dispose of; the surgeon's office gave me an estimate of perhaps $9,000. If I'm not able to secure the money to have FFS done at the same time, then it will be another objective to accomplish at some point in the future, at much greater expense.

So there we have it. $19,000 seems like a lot - and it absolutely is, not least of all to me. I also recognize that it's less than what other trans folks are faced with, and there are countless worthy causes to donate to. As much as I need a hand, so do many others.

Yet any amount given, every small contribution, is of immense aid in realizing my dream - in helping me to be who I was meant to be. "If everyone who saw this donated just $1-2," etc. etc. - it's cliché, but it's true. I'm loathe to ask for assistance, but at no point in my life before now have I needed it as much as I do in this moment. I'm so close, but I need a bit more to get there and ensure stability.

As of yet the surgeries are months away. Whatever I can scrape together between now and then will be apportioned by priority, which of course may affect just what I'm able to accomplish. Who knows, maybe I'll eke out a victory and wind up with even lower total expense than I anticipate. One way or another I'll aim to update this fundraiser if/as I get more information.

In the meantime, thanks for stopping by. Please donate if you can, and share - every little bit can make a difference, and the more reach I can achieve with this, the better.

Cheers!