Support LJ's Top Surgery Recovery!

Hello All! I am excited to share that I am prepping for top surgery this week! It's been a long journey to get to this point, and there have been many bumps along the way, but I feel enormous gratitude for all the love, care, and support I have received to get to this point.

This surgery has been something I have been focused on receiving for nearly two years, and after much heartache and hunting for a surgeon, I have found a doctor I like and trust and I feel so blessed and excited to be moving toward surgery this week. There have been many points in the last two years when I have felt lost, even hopeless, not sure who I was or what I was becoming, having fear at times to look in the mirror because I couldn't dare risk the heartache of not recognizing myself. I have felt the painful grip of gender dysphoria when I felt the world around me couldn't see me as I was becoming.

I have found my way through relying on my personal practices for healing, a solid trans-competent medical team, and the invaluable care work from my partner, family (blood and chosen), and wider web of queer kin cheering me on. Receiving this top surgery is a long-awaited and powerful step in my journey toward feeling at ease and at home in my body.

About a month ago, after I received a date for surgery, I had to turn down a teaching contract for this semester, which means I lost all my expected income for the next couple months. With your support, I will be able to cover my expenses during my recovery time from surgery. I'm so excited to receive this long-awaited medical care as I continue on my journey of gender becoming! Thank you so much for being a part of my constellation of support and witnessing.

I am home in this boat called my body.

I am learning to trust my Becoming.

Surgery is ceremony.

All of this is homecoming.

All of this is healing.

I wanted to share an excerpt from a facebook post that I shared in 2020 for National Coming Out Day, my first time sharing publicly about my gender transition. It still rings true for me today:

"You can call me LJ. My pronouns are they|them. I am a queer/genderqueer/gender nonconforming human out here enlivening the ways gender and sexuality can disarm convention and tobble an empire with a collective queer force of beautify and magic and fuckery.

I feel my gender and sexuality through the land and the trees and the stars.

I am so honored to be walking with/toward a gender that includes a masculinity that is formless and curious and sacred and held by a lineage of trans masculine expressions across time. I'm scared as shit sometimes and when it peaks, I soften, grow wider and turn to community. I am learning how I can be held and seen in my transition.

Thanks for your witnessing."

EVERY GIFT MADE TO THIS CAMPAIGN WILL RECEIVE A PERSONAL LOVE NOTE VIA USPS IMBUED WITH MY HEARTFELT GRATITUDE :)

A portion of my fundraiser will be given to the Nipmuc nation, whose lands I currently live on and where I will be healing. I make this gift in heartfelt gratitude for being a guest in this territory and to continue to concretize my aim for right relations as a white settler living on indigenous lands.

Cover photo by Eliza Bell