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diaftheirw-ola:

Lately I’ve been feeling massive dysphoria. I can’t even look at myself anymore.

I just hit six months on testosterone and I’m pretty sure I passed more often before I was on hormones than I do now.

It’s almost summer and I’m sick of having boobs. As it becomes less and less possible to bundle up the top half of my body with sweaters, flannels, and hoodies, I’ve become increasingly easily agitated. I hate wearing clothes that are too baggy because they look bad but I can’t wear shirts that fit me well because I get self-conscious about my chest. I spend hours a day readjusting, looking down, frowning, and squirming.

Not only have I been generally depressed and angry, but I’ve felt unwanted and even fallen into slacking on my testosterone injections because I feel so foreign in this body. I’ve been binding since I was 16 years old; I am now 23. Most of the time I don’t even loosen my binder(s) when I go to sleep, and sometimes I wear two at a time. I know these things are dangerous, but I’d rather look somewhat like what I feel like and die in my sleep than risk anyone getting a glimpse of what I “really” look like. It’s not just that I’m uncomfortable; sometimes I feel like I’m dying inside of here.

I have two other financial obligations right now:

1. My family; my dad recently has been going through some financial troubles and is in charge of supporting a plethora of my siblings and nephews, so I’ve been trying to help him out.

2. School. I currently owe my old community college $2000 and to get back in to school by fall, I have begun paying them back in installments.

On the school note, it is really important to me to have surgery lined up by the time I go back to school so that I can legally change my name and gender (pursuing an “on-going transition” or “finishing” one is part of the requirements for gender change in my state) and have my college records reflect that. I’d like to not have to go through the uncomfortable process of outting myself to everyone in my school, including professors, administration, and douchebag classmates because of changes to birth name and gender on my record, especially after the stress it’s been causing me at my job.

There is a plastic surgeon in Cleveland who specializes in FTM top surgery that I’m thinking of going to, and the whole operation costs the standard price of $6500. I don’t have insurance, but even if I did, they don’t cover gender-related surgeries.

Any help or signal-boosting would obviously be awesome.