funding the revolution:

how $477 FROM TRANS LIFELINE changed my life

A QUICK CAVEAT:

This is not a blog that is going to explore economic theory, criticize late capitalism, mine any of the intersecting social determinants of health, or even begin to describe the various injustices, structural or personal, that lead to the disproportionate rates of poverty, under employment, and financial abuse that trans and BIPOC people face. While I suspect this story is in many ways a microcosm of all the aforementioned, what this post aims to claim is instead how low barrier microgrants, and specifically those that directly benefit marginalized communities, have the potential to reorder the trajectory of a person’s life – at least it did for me. 

FIRST, A LOT ( & STILL NOT ENOUGH) BACKGROUND:

I grew up in a small, mostly white, beach community in the Deep South. I was the youngest of three children in a mixed-race and newly middle-class family. I was frequently reminded by my parents, who had come from working-class families, just how much we had compared to each of them growing up. My father was a directing manager of a resort and my mother worked as a contract art teacher for a local non-profit organization. When I was 14 years old, after two years of emotional, physical, and financial devastation related to his throat and lung cancer, my father died. Like many families in this situation, paying back medical bills, funeral expenses, and making ends meet required my mother to exhaust almost all of the money her and my dad had saved over the years, cash in on all of their investments, and my siblings and I each had to get part time jobs. To stave off the bullying and exclusion I had experienced in early childhood as a visible racial, sexual, and gender minority, I worked tirelessly as a teenager to excel academically, athletically, and relationally through charitable and religious causes. From this, I (regretfully) chose to attend a private Christian college and despite having enough AP credits to graduate early and earning university-based academic and athletic scholarships which were supplemented by four different additional private scholarships, I still needed to borrow around $30k to fund three years worth of full-time tuition, room and board, books, and student fees. I had jobs both on campus and off campus throughout this time and there were a thousand things I did to cut costs and save money, for example, making most of my meals from the leftover or nearly spoiled food we were supposed to throw out at the restaurant I worked at. Don’t worry, I only had food poisoning three times.

The real hardship over these years was more related to being actively traumatized by “pray the gay away” teachings and programs at my school and church. I became severely depressed, anxious, and autoimmune compromised. When I needed to go to the doctor or dentist for something minor, I couldn’t afford it, so I didn’t go. This led to further medical and dental complications which led to larger medical and dental expenses that I couldn’t forgo. On a couple occasions, I had to be rushed to the ER (I opted for a friend to drive instead of calling an ambulance because LOL at paying for a $2000 ride), accrued thousands of dollars in debt because my worthless insurance did not deem these situations ‘catastrophes’, and then through months of petitioning and fighting for medical scholarships, I was finally able to get these expenses covered by the hospital. While having such dire material circumstances felt sort of unfortunate at the time, I didn’t think about it much because I had internalized this belief that I deserved poverty and I deserved to suffer. Because there were millions of people in worse situations than me, I didn’t believe I had any right to feel upset, moreover to think about what I was experiencing as injustice. 

Through some benevolent and extremely patient queer friends I had made, I realized that it might be possible for me to actually want to, you know, be alive if I could get out of communities that explicitly believed that LGBTQ identities were pathological and implicitly believed that non-white expressions of faith were subservient, so I left. My family, per their own religious convictions at the time (they’ve finally come around but that’s another story for another time) made it clear that they would in no way be able to help or support me to get on my feet, so I graduated and began to sleep on the couches of friends and out of my car as I applied for so many jobs I lost count. The only offer I received was from a LGBTQ non-profit in Kansas whose compensation included housing, a $700 monthly stipend, and help with applying for Medicaid and SNAP. While still technically in poverty, this was in every way the best living situation I had ever been in. What I mean by that is I had meaningful work, a supportive community, and for the first time in four years, I wasn’t eating out of trash cans. I got on an income-driven student loan repayment plan, joined a friend’s cell phone family plan, and found other creative ways to save money that were no longer detrimental to my health. After two years working in Kansas, I applied for a job with a different non-profit that was in more alignment with my skills, and passions, and relocated to Atlanta. I began to receive a full-time salary and employer based health insurance and truly, I felt rich. Maybe needless to say, I still had not developed much financial literacy and because I was making substantially more money than the year previously, I began to pay down my student debt with a vengeance. This of course meant I wasn’t saving any money and consequently,  a few years later when I had a moral obligation to quit this job, I had zero safety net and didn’t qualify for unemployment.

By this point, I had began to accept that while some of the misfortune in my life had to do with my own mistakes and choices, much of it was the cumulative result of the systemic issues that interlock and intersect in a way where queer, trans, and brown people living with any form of disability often end up also being poor. I may not have believed that my identities were pathological or damned by God anymore, but I did begin to subscribe to a kind of Murphy's Law idea about my life – if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Read in a different way, if anything can be more taxing, tedious, bureaucratic, undignifying, and time-consuming, then it will certainly be more taxing, tedious, bureaucratic, undignifying, and time consuming.

Enter scene: The Trans Lifeline Name Change Grant.

By early 2020 I had been living as my authentic self for two years. For me, this included going by real my name (which is different than what was given to me at birth) socially and professionally, starting hormone replacement therapy, and living an existence that while more healthy and whole than ever before, still included identification documents that did not match the person anyone checking my ID saw in front of them. This led to harassment, bullying, verbal assault, perpetual discomfort, and frankly, shame. I knew that having an accurate ID would help keep me safer in interactions with the public, avoid discrimination in employment and housing, and affirm that my identity as a trans person was real and valid. But I also knew that it would be next-to-impossible for me to access a new ID because my local laws around changing my name and gender marker were confusing at best and discriminatory at worst. I suspected that the court and clerks’ offices would be staffed with employees who might not understand the process for trans people, or- more disturbingly, employees who were transphobic. And perhaps most obviously, the process from start to finish was going to cost me about $500 which would have taken me at least three months to save and even then I still probably would opt to buy groceries or pay more student debt than to change my name and gender marker. The former was a necessity, the latter I saw as a luxury.

Okay, sure $500 is probably nice to receive for free, but how was being cut that check transformative?

Well, because it was about so much more than the money. 

The whole process from application to disbursement was so easy, painless, and surprisingly, fun? It made me wonder “Is this what it’s like when a system is built to work for you?” Trans Lifeline, at least in my experience, engages its micro-grant program on a comprehensive case-by-case basis. I was responding to questions written by trans people, for trans people. I was on the phone with other trans people guiding me through the process with clear, concise, and up to date local information. When I had questions or expressed concerns, I was provided peer-support that made me feel at ease, encouraged, and empowered. Now, Trans Lifeline did not eliminate the hoops that the Dekalb County, Georgia makes a person jump through to change their name, their gender marker, and to update their identity documents, but having the financial burden of it all released flipped a switch.

That experience catalyzed an entire paradigm shift for what the rest of my life could look like. 

The support I received changed how I began to relate to housing, to employment, to socializing, and created a general sense of freedom and safety to move about in the world. Moreover, it fundamentally raised the bar for what type of treatment I could receive and could ask for from the universe, from businesses, from institutions, and from other people. I imagine that there were various other cosmic, relational, and material realities at that time that also contributed to ending the various narratives I had about being trapped in poverty forever…

But I still point to the day I deposited that $477 check into my bank account as one that I haven’t been the same person since.