Montrealer Elijah Renard is hoping to provide an educational experience while crowdfunding for his procedure. Photo: Courtesy of Elijah Renard Crowdfunding has secured thousands for such inane causes as a giant potato salad, but members of the transgender community have begun using it for a worthier cause: feeling at home in their own bodies.
Montrealer Elijah Renard has turned to crowdfunding to get the money needed for what’s known as top surgery — the removal of breast tissue and reconstruction to create a masculine chest. With a campaign on IndieGoGo, cheekily called Free Kitties, Renard is seeking $9,450 to get the procedure done at a Florida clinic. With just over a week left, he’s raised $1,744 so far.
The freelance video game designer’s campaign page is filled with delightful pixel art but also has a video explaining what it’s like to walk around with two binders strapped on. Binders are used to flatten breasts and give the appearance of a flat, masculine chest. In the video, Renard removes his shirt and binders — with a couple of kittens as censors — while explaining the discomfort of having one’s organs squished inward all day.
“[The binder] compresses the rib cage, which then compresses your lungs, which then compresses your intestines and stomach. It’s like putting on a corset, I would imagine,” Renard, 30, told Postmedia. “The pressure is really hard to explain if you haven’t tried a binder before.”
It’s a brave and rather endearing look at something many cisgender — people whose gender assignment at birth matches their identity — have probably never encountered.
If the video makes you feel a but awkward or uncomfortable, that’s okay. Renard is just trying to offer an honest look at what it’s like to be in his skin.
“To me the video is uncomfortable because that’s what I feel in my own body everyday,” said Renard. “To me the breasts are all over the place, and they’re bouncing around, and they’re following gravity, and they have a life of their own, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
There is an important caveat here: there’s a cultural preoccupation with the bodies of transgender people and what anatomical bits they may or may not have. At best, it’s objectifying and detracts from conversations about what it’s like to live as a transgender person — not to mention it’s plain rude. At worst, it affects the safety and well-being of transgender people, from where they’re housed if imprisoned to what gender they may have on government-issued identification to the high prevalence of assault committed against transgender individuals.
I realized that most people have no idea what the daily life of a trans guy is
All that being said, Renard is putting it all out there in hopes of providing both education and visibility for trans issues.
“I would explain to friends and family what [binding] is and then I realized that most people have no idea what the daily life of a trans guy is. That made me say, OK then, I’m just going to strip and show what it is,” he said.
He’s also not the first transgender person to turn to crowdfunding to raise money for surgery or other treatment and the trend is indicative of the difficulty transgender people have accessing health care.
A search on sites like IndieGoGo or GoFundMe reveals numerous campaigns from transgender individuals trying to pay for what can be an expensive process. Those who choose to get surgery — and not all do — face costs just for the procedure itself but for travel and recovery time. It’s a tall order for a community that faces high rates of poverty. A 2011 survey from the U.S.-based National Center for Transgender Equality found participants were nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000 per year, compared to the general population.
Even in Canada where some provinces cover surgeries, Renard said there’s little choice in who performs the procedure. The Florida clinic Renard found had the doctors, procedures and consistent results he was looking for.
In Quebec, he would also have had to jump through some hoops to get coverage, including letters from psychologists and other doctors and application fees. Provinces may also not cover cosmetic procedures such as facial surgery or vocal chord operations — which a transgender individual may consider essential to their transition.
Hence, turning to the internet. Some of these campaigns have made headlines, too, including a Boston fraternity that crowdfunded their brother’s procedure in 2013.
“Whilst I understand why people are doing this, it certainly should be a wake-up call for our government, our country to address this,” said Helen Kennedy, executive director of LGBT advocacy organization Egale Canada.
“When you look at access to health care for our trans people, it is minimal,” she said. “The medical training that any medical practitioner gets on LGBT, and T (transgender) in particular, issued before they become practitioners, it’s less than four hours.
“It’s a very serious problem and I think that our health care ministries need to address it. Having access is the first thing and being able to access and being able to see a doctor who gets it and understands the issue is also of primary importance.”
That 2011 report also found 19 per cent of those surveyed had been refused medical care and 50 per cent said they had to educate their own medical providers about transgender care.
For Renard, accessing these procedures is also a matter of safety. Transgender people sometimes find themselves praised by others for “passing,” meaning they’re being perceived by others as the gender they identify as. But, Renard says, this isn’t a compliment because passing, for transgender people, is a way of evading violence.
“When I talk about passing as a security blanket, I think a lot about my trans-sisters and it’s a life-or-death situation where there’s so many cases of trans women that have been murdered by their lover or by a date because they get outed,” he said.
“At the beginning of my transition it was a lot harder because I was very ambiguous so people didn’t know if I was female to male or male to female. And that makes them very uncomfortable and then they put that discomfort on you and it’s very scary. I am lucky that I have not experienced violence per se since I started my transition, but I’m probably one of the exceptions.”
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