Hi, I'm Sophie. On the 7th of December I'll be running 26.2 miles in the Valencia Marathon.

It's getting colder and darker. My body is insisting it would rather sit on a sofa than run 50 miles a week.

To help put paid to this impulse, I’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to raise money for my dear friends Dee and Robyn.

I'm hoping to get them both closer to the healthcare they want, need and deserve.

I'm also hoping it gives me an incentive to keep running five days a week and staves off the sirens' call of drinking red wine in a wearable blanket instead.

If you're reading this, and have any amount of money to spare, I'd massively appreciate it if you would consider donating to this fundraiser. Any money you donate will be split between them both.

If you're not in a position to do that, then I'd be grateful if you would think about sharing this fundraiser with your personal and professional networks.

Sharing not only means it will be seen by more people and raise more money, your endorsement helps legitimise and normalise this type of fundraiser outside the trans community.

How your donations will help

Dee has booked vocal feminisation surgery on for the 8th December. She needs to find around £1,000 by then so the procedure can go ahead, and then another £500 for the required follow up appointments.

The next step Robyn is aiming for in her transition is also vocal feminisation surgery. She needs approximately £5,500 pounds to be able to achieve the voice she wants.

Vocal feminisation surgery raises the pitch of your voice. Having this procedure will go a long way towards them not being misgendered.

Being misgendered is not only upsetting and invalidating, but being recognised as trans is increasingly unsafe in the current political climate. Having this surgery would help them both feel safer and more confident in navigating the world.

Trans healthcare in the UK

If you're trans then you're already painfully aware of the state of trans healthcare, feel free to skip to the final section.

If you're not trans, then the below helps provide context for why trans people are left with little choice but to find money to pay for their own healthcare.

More than 48,000 people in the UK were waiting for their first NHS gender clinic appointment as of March 2025. This represents a 12.5% increase since the previous year.

Adult patients in England referred by their GP to an NHS gender clinic are currently waiting an average of twelve years for their first appointment. In practice these waiting times vary massively at the established clinics. From 3 years for Nottingham, 12 years for London and up to 31 years in Exeter. Meanwhile outside England the current waiting time to be seen in Glasgow stands at a mind boggling 224 years.

For a hormone prescription - the same hormones a GP will prescribe willingly to their non transgender patients - a second appointment at a gender clinic is almost always required. The waits for these again vary greatly, but in some places are measured in multiple years.

After your hormone regime is established you may be considered suitable to be referred for surgery.

The only surgeries currently performed by the NHS are masculinising or feminising genital reconstruction, and masculinising mastectomy/related chest reconstruction. The waiting times for these surgeries are withheld by those controlling the waiting lists, and we know they vary between types of surgery, but these waits also are measured in multiple years, some more than a decade.

These waiting lists continue to get longer, and have been doing so for decades.

The UK is the only country in Europe that doesn't offer trans women facial feminisation surgery. It also doesn't offer breast augmentation, body contouring or adequate facial hair removal. These are all procedures outlined as necessary by the professional body WPATH. WPATH publishes the internationally recognised Standards of Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse People that NHS gender services are nominally based on.

Increasingly the only way to access any form of transgender healthcare is to pay for it yourself.

Thank you

Thanks for reading this far. There's an ever increasing number of these fundraisers and I don't think many of us feel like we have a matching increase in spare income to donate to them.

Any money you are able to donate is appreciated. 200 people giving a fiver gets us to a grand. If you can’t donate, PLEASE SHARE: the more people see it, the more chance we have of raising money.