Maddie's Gender Affirming Healthcare Fundraiser

This fundraiser exists to make facial feminisation surgery (FFS), laser hair removal and continued fertility treatment possible for my wonderful, incredible life partner Maddie. Bat- and data-scientist, sound-lover, dedicated community organiser and core member of London’s climbing and raving scene, Maddie is a lot of things to a lot of people, but embedded in all of these facets of her is an absolutely unique blend of integrity, curiosity and generosity: I have never met another woman like Maddie. Very few people in life have a capacity for love like she does, and it is with this capacity in mind, and what it has brought to the lives of so many others, that I am now asking you to support her in turn.

FFS is, put simply, a set of surgical procedures to subtly alter elements of your face and accentuate their femininity. It will change Maddie's life. As a trans woman, it can be difficult and scary to admit quite how much something like facial dysphoria can affect your life day-to-day, but I intimately know how painful and uncontrollable an experience it can be – it is a daily struggle for Maddie. Last year, the extraordinarily talented surgical team at FacialTeam offered Maddie a quote for surgery on her brow and trachea, two procedures that would allow her to see in the mirror the woman she deserves to, the one I can see every time I look at her. FFS is no longer a possibility for trans people through the NHS, and so it is a procedure that requires private, communal funding. The same goes, too, for Maddie's access to further laser hair removal sessions, as well as for continued fertility treatment. Factoring in existing savings, travel and accommodation costs for the journey to and stay in Spain where Facialteam operate from, we have arrived at a funding goal of £8.5k. Any size of donation, even just a share of this donation page to friends, colleagues or family, is important.

Maddie has been transitioning for over 10 years, and the difficulties she has encountered in that time have made this transition non-linear. I don’t want to dwell upon the ways in which the world has been unkind to my girlfriend, nor to forget the genderqueer butch I fell so deeply in love with three years ago, but since then I have had the privilege of watching Maddie locate and nurture a tenderness and a vulnerability that had gotten lost somewhere along the way. About a year ago, we both realised the direction our transitions were taking, together, and what that hope for the future would mean for us – FFS is one of those things. I have been lucky enough to raise funds for my own surgery, and I know that anyone who knows the two of us will understand quite how much Maddie deserves the opportunity to pay for hers, too.

To put things more simply: Maddie is, straightforwardly, one of the most beautiful women to have strode this earth and so it strikes me - and, I’m sure, you - as manifestly unjust for her self-esteem or -worth to be knocked by something as corrosive as dysphoria, especially when the possibility exists of alleviating it. Maddie turns 30 this year, and I truly want nothing more than her to enter the next decade of her life with an access to the confidence and comfort the money from this fundraiser would grant her.

Maddie has maintained since the day I met her that getting her previous gender-affirming surgery is the best decision she ever made; please, join in helping her make another.