Help Elaine Scattermoon defeat facial dysphoria

Hi there! Thank you for visiting this page. It means a lot to me personally that you're even reading this in the first place.

This is my crowdfunder to get help meeting the costs of Facial Feminisation Surgery (FFS) so I can overcome the damage that was done to me by a traumatic enforced male puberty as a teenage girl, and disappear my facial dysphoria so I can fully engage with the world and life and love with confidence and happiness, something I have tried and failed to do without it. I'm asking now because I have a minor Twitter platform that I have worked hard to build and that may well soon vanish after Elon Musk's takeover of the site leaving me with no means of asking for help anymore.

Every little bit you can offer is deeply appreciated, and I promise I will do all I can to pay it on in kind in the future.

Thank you,

Elaine Scattermoon

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The long version:

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Some backstory - the ongoing damage of 'desistence therapy' as a trans teen in the early 00s

I knew I was a girl as a child even though I didn't know how that could be the case, and I was able through reading a lot of books and exploring the very early Internet to discover that I was actually trans in my early teens, before puberty. I felt very fortunate in that respect, that I could stave off a male puberty that filled me with cold dread and absolute horror, and get the female puberty I deeply longed for and which felt much more right for me. So I went to my doctor to seek help, and what I got instead was anything but.

I've talked at length about my experiences with what was known as 'desistence therapy' in this long Twitter thread - https://twitter.com/scattermoon/status/1584116431255638016 - and I'd encourage a read if you haven't just to give the full context, but I was essentially methodically gaslit by the gender identity clinic throughout my teens, with them using since-discredited techniques to try and get me to stop being trans by making me believe it was my own desire. I know now I never had any chance of getting puberty blockers that would have held off the puberty I so feared, but I also had no chance of even getting HRT when I hit my 18th birthday as was supposedly the official healthcare guidelines at the time. So I was forced to go through male puberty entirely against my own will with me begging, pleading, crying at the doctors to help do something to stop my own body betraying me in ways that have left me with lifelong trauma, changes that are permanent but could have been so easily avoided. I saw my own face change in ways that made me feel like my life was over from that point on and I was a suicidal hollow shell by the time I reached the age of 20.

Since then I was able to access transition and I'm now in my mid-thirties having lived my entire adult life after studenthood as a woman. A lot of the damage done in my teens has been mitigated or outright undone through years of HRT and GRS...but not with my face, and it's been a constant drag on my life in ways that continue to impact my quality of life. The facial dysphoria remains.

Facial dysphoria - why do you feel you need FFS?

It's hard to explain what the effect of all of this is like on my life. Despite all the work of self-acceptance I've done in other areas, and with other parts of my body, this still lingers like a demon on my shoulders. Whenever a photograph is taken of me, I dread seeing the result because all I end up seeing is what was done to me, the changes forced against my will, distorting my face. It's rough when a friend takes a photo of you at a happy event like a party or wedding or picnic, and when you look at the photo they happily show you, you see this warped version of yourself, and you want to tear your own face off there and then because a void would at least not be betraying everything you feel you are. Every time you take a selfie of yourself, you angle it carefully and take about 50 selfies just to get one you're vaguely happy with and the very next day, when you see it again, you hate it. I end up not able to watch videos of myself doing stand-up performances or DJ sets.

And worst of all, it stopped me dating for years, because I firmly believed that if I can't stand the sight of my own face then why should I expect anyone else to love it.

This isn't a good way to live, and it simply isn't getting better. Bodily acceptance came with the help of hormones and another surgery, and I now feel very much at home in my own flesh at last and smile at my reflection in the mirror - except for my face. This is why I feel I need some FFS. Just to help me no longer dodge my own reflection, to help me feel as confident as I am elsewhere, to let me live and love without it clawing me down into the cold abyss, to undo what I had done to me as a teenage girl as I begged and wept for someone, anyone, to stop it.

The Money Problem - why do you need this crowdfunder?

FFS is extremely expensive, honestly prohibitively so. At most clinics, the cost of individual procedures can total the sum of a deposit on a house, and if you require multiple procedures, then each is like another deposit. For this reason, I believed I would only be able to maybe achieve a single one, and even then only by using up all of my funds. However, a friend of a friend recently went to see a Russian surgeon, Dr Slutskaya, in Armenia, and her prices are considerably lower than those at equivalent western clinics. With this, and the good results my friend's friend reports, there is hope for me to meet my dreams.

However even then the cost is extremely high. I have some savings of my own but I don't have a high paying job and entering a cost of living crisis, it is difficult to make much in the way of further savings. In an ideal world, I would gradually save up money throughout my life, and then maybe make enough, but unfortunately time is of the essence - I want to live as much of my life as I can freed from this burden - and I can't exactly pay now and get the money later, not in any remotely safe way.

Which is why I'm asking for your help. This isn't the full cost of what I intend to get - it comes out to maybe half, I'm not asking you to pay for the whole thing for me, I don't feel I could do that - but it would make all the difference in just helping me get over that hurdle now so I can, finally, move on with my life. I'm not asking for a car, I'm asking for a lift.

It would mean the world to me. I want to be able to finally, twenty years after enforced male puberty damaged my face, finally smile at my reflection and just get on with my day like anyone else. It's an exorcism.

Why are you asking this now?

I'd been considering setting up this crowdfunder for a while but I kept putting it off because I honestly worried about asking. However with Elon Musk taking control of Twitter and threatening the further existence of the site through draconian staff cuts and unwise business decisions, I feel I am imminently about to lose the one platform I've managed to build for myself on the internet over all these years. I'm not a celebrity, I don't have a Twitch or podcast or regular column in the papers (they tend not to give you those if you're trans, I'm a journalist, I know).

All I have is my Twitter, my platform that I've spent almost half of my life on doing activism, explaining complicated issues in a way I hope others can understand, uplifting other voices who lack platforms of their own, and trying to raise awareness of severe issues like the trans healthcare crisis in the UK, the actual trauma involved in 'watchful waiting/desistence therapy' that I experienced as a teen, and many others - as well as occasionally sharing other content like my history of volcanologist Harry Glicken , or the 19th century microstate of Neutral Moresnet, or how to get the most out of attending a Eurovision . I've put a lot more work into my Twitter than people realise, and there's a real likelihood it's all about to disappear.

In other words, this feels like my last chance. A thread went around Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the initial layoffs, stating that with the end of the social network a tangible possibility, we should all ask for what we want now while we still have a chance. This is that.

How is your cat, Iffy?

Currently sleeping against my leg, on their back, dreaming about something as their ears twitch.