Gray's Surgery Fund

Hey! Thanks for checking out my fundraiser.

My name's Gray. I'm a trans-masculine person living in Glasgow.

I'm fundraising for gender-affirming surgeries - healthcare costs that aren't covered by the NHS.

Quite often trans people are reduced to what's in our pants, and frustratingly this is also the case in what is funded for NHS treatment.

Currently, in the UK, funded surgeries for trans masculine people include top surgery and lower surgery. While these surgeries are important and often lifesaving, gender services are incredibly underfunded and have inhumanely long wait lists. And the reality is, for a lot of trans folk, myself included, our dysphoria isn't limited to these parts of our body.

After several years on testosterone I feel so much more like myself. But to be honest, I still struggle to live in this body. Most of my dysphoria has always been around how my body stores fat and the "feminine" shape this gives me. It has a huge impact on my mental health, limits the activities I feel comfortable doing (I miss swimming so much) and makes finding masculine clothes that fit me very difficult.

After a few disappointing starts, I'm excited to have found a clinic with a trans-informed surgeon who has planned out treatment options (this will involve lipo and fat transfers) which will help me have a more masculine body shape, and I know will relieve huge amounts of the dysphoria I currently live with. I can't even explain the relief I've felt knowing there are options to "fix" these parts of me. I have the support of my GIC doctor, who said he's happy to provide letters of support saying he considers this part of my medical transition, even though it's something I'll need to pursue privately.

However, the cost of this surgery is much more than I'd anticipated.

Despite saving for over four years now, I'm still a long way off funding this treatment, and going another 5+ years of my life like this is becoming an unbearable thought. I'm desperate to go swimming again, and to buy clothes because they're me and I like them not just because they hide me well enough, and to be able to look in the mirror and feel good about what I see there.

The overall cost of the procedure is £8000. I have close to £3000 saved currently and plan to continue to save what I can, however, being on a low income and with the recent increase in living costs, saving has been harder and harder. I'm therefore looking to raise £5000.

I hate asking for help, especially monetary help when I know the cost of living crisis is hitting everyone. I wish this was something I had the means to self-fund. I wish that we lived in a world where trans people had access to the healthcare they needed and there weren't people losing their lives to waiting lists. For me, asking others for funding feels incredibly uncomfortable, but I'm starting to realise reaching out to our community and allies for help is the only way a lot of us will manage to get the transition treatments we need.

If you're able to and would like to help me fund this treatment, anything - no matter how little - would be so incredibly appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

-photo by the amazing Omar Salam (who somehow always manages to make me look cool).