Help Pay for Ezra’s top surgery!

Hey there!

I’m Ezra, (he/they) a nonbinary transmasc human who lives in Minneapolis Minnesota. I grew up between a swamp and a cornfield. I am pretty good at foosball and pretty bad at Settlers of Catan. I love my huge orange cat, reading fantasy novels, cooking, and being an amateur mycologist.

As a little kiddo, I was confused when classrooms had us split into gendered halves of the rooms for activities and exercises and I wasn’t quite certain why. I always loved to dress up! But more and more, dressing up felt like a costume to keep others around me happy with my assumed role of “girl” rather than anything genuine. Almost 8 years ago, with support from my friends, and community, I started my social transition. Following that, 2 or so years ago I began taking testosterone. It has helped my mental health immensely to do this.

I am not religious, but there is beauty in the holy, the divine, the breathtakingly mundane, the lovely, whatever speaks to you in a whisper, or yells in a roar that you can believe in. I think I read this somewhere, but I’d like to think that God made wheat, but not bread. Grapes, but not wine, so that humanity could share in the act of creation. In something called a “ divine alchemy of the self.” It makes it sound very ritualistic and cool when I inject my testosterone, at least, and that’s worth something. I find science beautiful, and I’m so happy to have resources and medicine be tools for not just me, but a long line of people discovering language, art, and medicine to see themselves and each other as whole real individuals with whole, real lives.

Learning about myself and my gender identity has paved a trail of so much love and appreciation to and from my community. I choose this path out of honest love. It has always been hard for me to put myself first, to think of my wants and needs as “important” or “ worth time/effort” but I know that top surgery would be an important step to truly feeling at home in my body. I’m excited to no longer have dysphoria and truly feel at home in my bones.

I have a surgery day, I have all of my appointments set. I have a therapist and a partner and tons of helpful, silly friends to beat me at Catan. I just need a little help to not be buried in medical debt, so all I truly need to worry about is recovery.

I have started this GoFundMe to have money to pay for the surgery, as I have a high-deductible health insurance plan, and since I am luckily a rather healthy person, my deductible still has quite a ways to go before it is met. That means the surgery will largely be out of pocket, as well as remaining expenses and affording to take time off from work. My office job is fully supportive and can be done remotely. I won’t need to even go on short term disability; and graphic design work doesn’t involve strenuous physical labor. I’m very lucky!

I'm setting the goal at $4,000, which would be so incredible I’ll probably cry just thinking about it. I would be grateful to anybody donating at any amount, even just sharing the link.

Thank you for taking the time to look at this, and I hope you can help however you can!

love love love, Ez.