hello all. please help me unchopify my face

i (shay) am a transsexual woman living in a city called toronto (which you may know of as the home of The Fancy Induced Burger, or for its recently yellow sky*). facial feminization has been a deeply held desire of mine for almost as long as i remember. [actually since i was 13, but that's pretty close!].

this 'gender-affirming' procedure would not only greatly improve my personal/psychological well-being, but also help me to exist in public with fewer instances of prejudice/harassment and less fear for my physical safety, as well as augment my capacity to be a Productive Member of Society by lowering the barriers posed by institutional discrimination in e.g. employment, housing, etc.

however, after almost 4 years of a disabling condition (hypopituitarism) from which i am only beginning to recover, the savings i'd put aside for the procedure have been depleted (and then some).

[a recent (inconclusive) brain mri -- i have the honour of doing another (hopefully conclusive) one in the coming months]

now that i've begun to recover i hope to return to working and putting money aside ASAP, but i am asking for additional support (from you, dear reader, what with your generous heart and kind soul...) via fundraising, as i hope to be able to book the surgery before i graduate and lose my university insurance which will otherwise cover up to $10,000 of the costs.

moreover, the costs of FFS rise and waitlists get longer every year, giving more urgency to least paying a deposit to book a date as i continue getting back on my feet -- hence my need for support in my efforts at this time.

(not to mention the additional urgency of stymieing the ever-growing sunk costs of a Lifetime of Regret and Anguish, which has admittedly weighed rather heavily on me the last several years)

[i'm on track to graduate in april 2027, but will likely defer until the next year in order to ensure my ability to utilize the coverage]

in 2024, i was quoted $73,450 (incl. tax) for a fairly 'bare bones' (haha) FFS of only 3 procedures (cranioplasty [brow bone/forehead reconstruction], genioplasty [jaw reshaping], and chondrolaryngoplasty ['adam's apple' reduction aka 'tracheal shave']), of which $5,000 will be required as a deposit to book the surgery.

[ffs quote -- because i'll be doing the procedure locally, i won't incur additional costs for travel or an extended hospital stay. all funds raised will therefore go towards the surgery itself.]

since wait lists are long, there will still be a long while between paying a deposit and the actual surgery date, during which i can continue to save up(/fundraise). in addition to the $5-10k that insurance will cover, i also have a modest line of credit available that will finance $10k to be paid off later in case i’m not able to pay the full amount in cash on the day of the procedure.

many thanks for reading/sharing/donating :-)

gratefully and with warmth,

shay

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some more about me, and my life, and why i am prostrating myself, humbly asking for your monetary support:

after already identifying as trans for a couple years, i 'came out' to my parents at 15 with the sole hope of (at least) halting the male puberty i was suffering through, but unfortunately they were unsupportive at the time.

i briefly began hormonal treatment when i was able to (at 18), but second guessed my decision for a long while** before beginning my (medical) 'transition' (in earnest) 4 years ago.

although this has done a lot to make my life relatively livable (much moreso than a younger me would've expected), i continue to experience a great deal of gender dysphoria, especially regarding my face.

much of these feelings owe to the permanence of the changes my body underwent in pubescence, and are compounded by their association with my experience of having been acutely distressed by those changes as they were occurring but nonetheless being powerless to prevent them (despite my efforts).

facial feminization would help to alleviate these feelings of what the dsm-5 terms "clinically significant distress" and "impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" (thereby making it a little easier to live with myself, to feel comfortable in my skin, maybe even eke out some self-confidence, and so on -- in short, ffs would improve my 'mental health.')

perhaps more importantly, facial feminization would represent a substantial quality of life improvement in terms of my ability to exist in public -- not only in the immediate sense of not having to fear for my physical safety as often and experiencing less instances of prejudice and harassment, but also improve my long-term ability to enter into a career and working life.

while there isn't any one procedure that could singlehandedly make me 'pass' as a woman, my face tends to be one of my more prominent 'tells', and to be the most frequent object of scrutiny (and derision/ridicule) in the more unpleasant public interactions that i've experienced.

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**in part owing to the aforementioned experience and my doubts about my ability to live a fulfilled life (or live at all, really) after already having undergone The Wrong Puberty, as well as to the more general stresses of the Transition To Adulthood, or whatever

*you may also know of toronto as the stand in for the nyc setting of the 2005 biopic Get Rich or Die Tryin'. similarly, the maxim upon which my life has been premised since age 12 is to 'get fish or die trying'.