- ranty, rant rant -

[demonlurking]

---

I am a trans woman.

At the moment the government of the United States of America wants to "eradicate" me. (Their word, not mine.)

What follows is a personal rant. If you don't want to read it, don't. This applies to those who might be having their own difficulties right now and for whom this is just another whiny trans-girl ranting.

Warning whiny rant enclosed

I am a trans woman.

I am poor and for most of my life always have been.

I grew up the only child of a single mother working odd jobs and receiving food stamps while she put herself through college.

As a trans woman, I want to reshape my body to match my mental image of myself.

This is called gender affirming care and cisgendered people use it ALL THE TIME. Every cis woman who has had a breast augmentation or reduction. Every cis man who has had hair implants. Every cis woman who has had electrolysis to remove facial hair. I repeat, ALL THE TIME.

But, for the most part it is expensive. Especially to someone living paycheck to paycheck.

But for a transgender person, these things can be, literally, life saving.

After two years on hormones, my breasts have fairly calmly settled into B cups.
I can wear a compression sports bra to work and boymode without question still. I'd really like them to be bigger, more proportional to my 6'4" 300lb. body. That requires some form of breast augmentation, not something I can currently afford.

After a year and a half of laser hair removal my beard is starting to get patchy. But the hair that is still there doesn't grow any slower and I still need to shave away the stubble every day. I'd really like to get electrolysis. But that requires hours of sessions every week. Once again, financially out of my reach.

I desperately want bottom surgery, but it is an incredibly invasive surgery with an extended healing time. I would need approximately six months recovery time before I would be able to go back to work at my current job. That requires, not just the surgery cost (which is at the high end of a new car or the low end of buying a house), but also living expenses for those six months. Yet again, way out of reach financially.

Some of this can be partially covered by insurance if you live somewhere where they force insurance to cover it, but that still requires a fairly large copay/deductible in addition to the everyday food and shelter during recovery.

Also, several surgeons refuse to operate on patients who are overweight, or above a certain age, or who have other health issues. Usually in an effort to reduce complications, but that still means excluding a decent portion of transgender people who might manage to actually afford their care.

All this to say, that coming out at 48, and having spent decades not caring for the meat shell I have been forced to inhabit, means that waiting 4 to 6 years for the damage that the current regime is doing to our systems is going to put me out of the range of most of these surgeries and would make my quality of life manageable.

So goes the life of a trans woman in 2025 America.


You may now ignore me like everyone else and go about your day.

---