Iiia Needs A New Face!

Imagine, if you will, that every time you look in the mirror, you don’t see yourself in your reflection. What you see may be a grotesque, monstrous, bizarre facsimile of “you”; or, there’s an uncanny valley you reach where the more you start to recognize yourself you somehow enter another dimension, a nightmarish hellscape where you are alone and alien to your own reality. Your first instinct is to look away, close your eyes and perhaps cry away the image but it’s no use. That monster is there whenever you leave your house, in every car window or store window, in every angry transphobic racist face staring back at you, in your bed with you at night! You are me. This is what it’s like to be me. I am a woman who was born transgender.
I want desperately to not be read as “male”. I was assigned a gender at birth by my doctor and he and my parents and everybody else were mistakenly going along with this erroneous assumption. Everybody deserves the right to gender self-determination free from the binary and at their own time. I am nonbinary which means I don’t believe I am male or female but I definitely am femme of center and A WOMAN. Always have been, always will be. The problem I’m having, is there are a lot of transwomen being targeted for their sheer existence and assaulted or murdered. I understand that to be a woman is often not up to you yourself but to society, let alone be to be “a lady”. Being catcalled for cisgender women leads often to sexual assault but for transgender women, there is the added danger of being murdered on top of that.
I am terrified for my life. I cry for days on end and don’t leave the bed, let alone the house for fear of showing my face. I feel like a prisoner. I don’t want to be scared that every time someone misgenders me or calls me “sir” in public, or shouts “That’s a dude!” “That’s a man!” from their cars, someone else who has murderous hatred for transgender women and otherwise thought I “passed” for a cisgender woman would try to hurt me. There was a woman up the street from my house who’s apartment was set on fire with her inside and she happened to be a well loved transwoman and a sex worker. This is a reality for a lot of us. I don’t cast aspersions on anybody because I have done sex work. I just don’t want to have to rely on it anymore. Although it’s becoming increasingly difficult to take care of myself.
I need everyone’s help! I want strangers to see me and unequivocally read me as female. That requires some manipulation of my appearance to more closely align to what is deemed feminine and at the same time look like the me I want to see in the mirror. I need facial feminization surgery. For a lot of transwomen, it is the answer for their dysphoria. I have been on HRT for about a year and have been getting facial electrolysis and this is an immense relief from my anxiety over my masculine looks. I will greatly benefit from the surgery in ways that I can only hope to show through my appreciation and renewed vigor. I am an artist. I am at your service, I love to perform and I love to make friends. I can’t make art right now through all the tears. Please, consider donating to my fund or pass this to someone you think might. You’d be saving my life and I’d be forever in your debt.