Help Blaze Achieve His Gender Affirming Top Surgery: JAN2025

Hi, my name is Blaze (he/him pronouns).

I am in full swing fundraising for my upcoming top surgery! I finally have a concrete surgery date: JANUARY 14, 2025 !!!

I know for a fact that I will at least have $6,500 to pay on my own. I definitely will need help. I’m doing a steady job and saving up for this but with your help I’m certain I will hit my goal!

My birthmother (my wonderful Mom) and I took that photo at my first family holiday with her. She said that was the outfit she would have chosen too and told me I looked very handsome. Her “handsome son.” I was over the moon.

I was hesitant to make a fundraiser because I know that so many transgender people need their money for their surgery. It is very difficult for me to ask anyone for financial help. So many of us are in financial crisis due to all the inflation and life in general. So please don’t feel pressured: I know you care, and that feels incredibly affirming and wonderful.

I have always been nervous about taking space or resources from people who need it more than me.

But I have decided that I am allowed to advocate for myself. I will do as much for myself as I would do for my beautiful transgender siblings in our beloved community.

I named myself “Blaze” and chose the middle name of “Ember” to convey the burning of many bridges as well as safe spaces in my life. I also chose it to forever remind me of the evolution of calm i feel now that i have left those ashes behind.

My name comes from my life experience as a transgender individual; who knows all too well the pain in my chest at 7 years old when I had this ‘feeling that I possibly wasn’t going to be able to morph into a boy.’ And that feeling reappeared again when I was told that ‘boys can’t have periods…so you’re a girl’…..even though I knew i certainly was not a girl. My heart cracked at each invalidation, each ‘no you’re not’ i received where it tried to make extinct the very fabrics of my being. I was forever frayed around the edges, threw myself into hyperfemininity around the people who made me feel like an imposter for living. But outside of them my gender identity was burning a hole through my very soul trying to make itself known.

My name. My chosen name. It isn’t random. It isn’t for fun or to sound cool. It genuinely is fully a description of how my life experiences have made me feel: in my body, around my adoptive family, around my acquaintances. As many of these human beings have repeatedly emotionally burned up, and burned me out. Set my hopes ablaze until I was just embers, struggling against my own frustrations not to burn out.

My precious name: “Blaze” is a description, a reminder, and a warning of how now, as an adult, I’m constantly on fire for myself and my community. A reminder and a warning to all who use t name that I am and I certainly will always set societal ignorance and disregard for others ablaze before i ever allow the worlds misperception of me to burn me out. I will not succumb to the pressure of my existence being erased anymore.

My beloved middle name: “Ember” describes my inner nature: always nearly burnt out from all that burning too bright around the attempts to snuff me out….But still forever a warm heart to those who need it. Forever a warm heart for those in general who see me as a human to love, not a monster to slay. “Ember” defines my experience as a woman: being treated like one, trying to act like one, not understanding how to be one. “She” is all my frustrations, all my realizations, and what “Blaze” born from as i stoked my mind trying to find answers and set my world alight. Blaze is who I am and who i always have been. But Ember is also. Being transgender doesn’t suddenly erase my life experiences from when everyone thought i would live as a woman. Being transgender simply means I have the ability to be genuinely me. It means I finally have the autonomy to live as fully myself.

So, I will pursue the path that is necessary for my future. And that is this surgery. My hopes, my dreams, my perseverance, my determination, my fears….these are all things that make me human. To dehumanize me only adds fuel to my eternal fight to survive in a world that chooses often not to see me as a human with human rights, human emotions, human experiences, and human needs.

With so much hatred and fear against me; and so much love and community to support me, I, Blaze Ember O. will never burn out.

I’m always happy to share the everlasting embers of my experience with other questioning transgender siblings on their own journey of discovering who they are.

So if you’re interested, I’ll share a bit now. Fellow transgender friends and those who wish to understand what this is like: I have had gender dysphoria for as long as I can remember taking a breath. It feels like you’re wearing someone else’s skin, living someone else’s life…but when you look i the mirror and put on your clothes the reality hits you that this life, no matter how disorienting….is all yours to have to reach the end of.

I was 5 years old when I was no longer allowed by my father to call myself a ‘tomboy’ the only gender affirming thing I had to describe myself as at the time …. and it felt like my heart was being locked in a cage. Trapped in my body, where gender euphoria went to die. Only free to express myself genuinely in the slow burning fire tarting it’s little embers in the back of my mind.

Since that day I haven’t felt safe to fully be myself. It’s been a long process to even convince myself I won’t be hurt if anyone discovers that I’ve had this surgery.

I have always been transmasculine and fluid in my gender expression. I have always used my “femme feeling days” as my own personal dress up show. But those femme days always end in gender dysphoria as I see myself in videos and feel forgotten and locked up in that cage of “no tomboy, only feminine” all over again. The joy and pride i should have felt in womanhood was completely corroded by he frustration of womanhood stealing my ability to even be recognized as a human being. I felt as if I was forever putting on a performance, only a shadow of a person-standing behind the persona of myself dancing in a pretty dress for all the audience to dote over and praise as they applaud me as i do their favorite routine: erasing the parts of myself that they don’t like, and that make up my entire existence. It made me resent my femininity. It made me feel numb. It made me need my space to go hide from the world’s eyes for 4 years and breathe.

do you want to know something interesting? I want this top surgery the second I had breast tissue. He has an immediately people stopped wondering if I was a boy or not. Immediately people started defaulting to “her, girl, she”. I wanted this top surgery in 2020. But there were so many people saying that to transition you have to get some surgery or it’s not truly valid. And that made me so angry I waited. Imagine the of telling people who have suffered their entire lives that you won’t accept their pain until you can see it physically. I hate the idea of that, And I hate the idea that some people will probably accept me more because I have had a surgery. But I have decided to stop allowing my spite for that mindset to add to the harm of my internal experience in this body. Because at the end of the day, I need this surgery for myself, not to prove that I’m transgender enough, not to prove anything really. It’s to save myself from having to look in the mirror another second and be a shadow behind the figure I see. It makes me tear up to write that, but that is exactly how it feels.

If I get this top surgery I know I will be able to look at myself in pretty dresses and makeup, and in cool suits, and finally be able to look at myself in the mirror. Not as a projection of myself, not as an avatar in a game that i am customizing, but as a real person dressing himself for the day. I have to feel this way, friends. Please help me get there. To be on the outside exactly how I feel on the inside when I dress in pretty dresses or suits. I deserve to be alive and to be present in my body right? I do…I do.

I don’t expect a ton of money, or to hit my goal of 6,500. It’s hard to push past my guilt and concern from even asking you all to donate…. But I have found that squirreling away $20.00 here and there myself has really added up. I have a lovely “Save Box” that I’m quite proud of.

Currently as I write this it is at $1,160.00.

So I’m asking you guys to donate $5.00 to $20.00 when you have it!

I am incredibly excited about the opportunity to finally get something for just myself. I’m beyond ready to feel connected with my spirit. I truly do still feel as if the body I’m in now is an avatar, a puppet that I speak through….that i stand behind. It seriously doesn’t feel like me entirely. That feeling of disconnect with myself saddens and frustrates me beyond anything I can describe with words. But hopefully I have made sense of it here.

Although my body is a lovely body—this body i live in and sustain….has never felt entirely like me. This surgery will take that feeling down an extreme amount. I have been pushing my chest fat in the mirror daily for 20+ years, imagining a life where my hands could be free and i still see the same result.

So please donate, share this, so I can continue my lifelong journey of showing who I am to myself when I see my body in the mirror.

Please donate what you can so that when I can’t wear my compression binder, I won’t have to feel that all too familiar wave of depression that hits me like a cell door slamming me in that cage I felt at 5 years and onward. That dysphoric cell door locking me in our society’s perception of what a woman looks like. Locking me out of ever having a chance of being perceived as a man or masculine.

I know I will be able to get this surgery, because things have always worked out in my favor in my life eventually . Even through all the traumatic experiences / events I’ve survived. Situations have always come to bless my soul and comfort my mind.

I’m truly blessed and protected by whatever good things you and I believe in.

This gofundme is here because community is more reliable than insurance. And my insurance historically has typically been hard to deal with around gender affirming care. I can’t count on it. Even if they do miraculously cover the surgery my out of pocket costs will be $6,500 at minimum.

Please give what you can, $5.00-$20.00 (if more I won’t complain of course!) and please share this gofundme for traction.

No pressure to ANYONE to fund me.

We all struggle, we all have bills and lives and animals to feed etc.

But when your life permits, and you remember me, please give whatever your circumstances allow.

I am forever grateful for you reading this, for those of you who share it, and for the many people who donate.

Thank you, and I’ll see you on the other side of surgery: a truly blessed and happy transmaculine-genderfluid man.

Blaze Ember Oakes

“Never giving up defines my personality.”