Nadia's Gender Reassignment Surgery Fund

I’ve only ever known my body as a problem. I’m making this GoFundMe campaign to ask for help in solving it. I confess that I’m deeply ambivalent about asking for help in this way. I am by nature an independent person. I am also intensely stubborn. In this instance, I’ve come to recognize these personality traits as more hindrance than help. So I’m publicly asking for help as I step into a new part of my life.

I was always aware I was different from my peers. I knew I understood myself as a woman at the level of my subconscious, yet the words to articulate this fact eluded me. It was only as I became older that I came to possess a lexicon to articulate the inconsistencies between my sense of self and others’ perceptions of me. (Mis)recognition became unbearable. It was then that I began to detach. It was surprisingly easy. I learned to compartmentalize. I pushed myself academically. I stayed busy socially. I drank too much. I got high too often. All to avoid any reckoning with my own identity.

Transition is a strange and opaque process. It began for me in high school in 2015. It wasn’t until 2020 that I came out as a trans woman. It is unequivocally the best thing I have ever done for myself. Since coming out, I am lighter. I no longer feel like a stranger to myself. I no longer feel like a shell. I no longer feel like an interloper in my own life. It is wonderful; sometimes, it’s overwhelming. These are freedoms many never get to have. They are freedoms I was unsure I would ever have. Coming out was the start of freeing myself from the confines I had lived in for too long.

Despite these freeing aspects of transitioning, coming out has also been immensely difficult. The realities of living in a transphobic society can feel crushing. Navigating institutional and interpersonal transphobia is draining. Watching as an onslaught of anti-trans bills targeting trans and queer youth are proposed in state after state is devastating. I sometimes wonder if we are watching the beginnings of a genocide as it unfolds in real time.

As Audre Lorde said, the personal is political. In this instance, my and others lack of access to necessary medical interventions reflects structural and institutional barriers to trans peoples flourishing. The high cost of necessary medical interventions for certain kinds of healthcare has prevented me, and many others, from accessing the most important medical intervention I need: gender confirmation surgery. I have lived with genital dysphoria since I was young. It is nausea-inducing. It causes me profound discomfort and severe emotional distress. It makes intimacy difficult if not impossible. Dysphoria can exacerbate depressive episodes, taking them from mild to severe. There are times when all I can do is cry.

While I don’t know that this is the ‘last’ step in my transition, it feels the most important. It will help me to establish a more solid sense of internal alignment. So I’m asking for help in raising funds so that I can access this surgery and go on with my life. Any donation helps. So too does sharing.