#financial instability

Hey everyone! I've been sorta out of contact lately bc a lot of stuff has been going on. A friend through my local SRA chapter has graciously allowed us to crash on his urban homestead - a quarter acre of land and assorted buildings (and his house) just north of downtown Reno. We're attempting to cost him as little as possible and to that end, he's allowed us (for a few days) to stay in his little 10-foot travel trailer before pitching our tent in a protected spot in his backyard, and he's letting us use his shower and water in exchange for working a little on the homestead and keeping an eye on his kids when he has to run quickie errands. He has the trailer hooked up to a Jackery Explorer 500 and a little off-brand 100w portable solar panel.

He has expressed a desire to upgrade to a Jackery Explorer 1000 v2, because he wants to install a little water heater in the trailer, and the 500 can't quite keep up with it. I mentioned that I have been wanting something similar to his 500 so we could have power even in the tent without costing him money, and also anywhere else we go in the future (and when we're housed, for keeping in the car for emergencies and such). He told me that the Jackery solar panels are good but overpriced and you can find good clones, but the power stations are really good.

Yesterday, I got an email that Jackery was having a pretty major sale for Mother's Day and bemoaned the fact that I have zero money rn. He got excited and then said he couldn't justify buying the 1000 even though it's on sale for like $450. I said the 500 is on sale for $300 rn so if he'd be willing to wait until the end of the month, I would buy the 500 from him and said sure, $200 good? And I said yes. He said we can work it off or pay him. It may be some combo of the two but either way, I have a solar generator!

So now I am the proud owner of a Jackery Explorer 500!

Now I need a solar panel. He'll let us use the one he has now but it's his and I'd like my own, obviously! I found one on Amazon that's perfect. It's only a little over a hundred, but it goes on sale regularly!

I think we'll be able to afford this come payday, but that's 3 weeks away. If anyone feels like donating towards a semi-normal lifestyle for us while we sort this all out (of course, y'all have helped a ton already and I super appreciate it. So fkn much. Soooo fkn much!) the panel is on our wishlist, and I can accept a few bucks here and there via Cashapp, PayPal, and Chime. All of my tags on those apps are $NovasPrime.

From this post.

“A new video has been posted, if everyone could share it and such when they're free that would rock. Taking deep breaths. Thank you all for your support and love.”

@a-captions-blog

Here’s the list of posts in chronological order for folks to interact with, if possible!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

This is part 4!

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

Being transgender is pretty difficult. There are a lot of ways this can affect your life, and well being, physically, mentally, and financially. This last category is one that is often neglected, and yet is of the utmost importance. Being prepared for how your identity will affect your future finances can help you weather the storm just that much better. Here are a few issues that I have identified based on research and personal experience.

1. Depending on your family and support system, you could lose much needed financial support after you come out.

I hate to start off on such a crappy note, but it needs to be said. This is still a reality for a lot of transgender and genderqueer folks, especially younger people. If your finances are not your own, or you are otherwise beholden to someone who may object to your identity (i.e. living with your conservative parents), you need to plan how you will support yourself after you come out. Of course, I hope and pray that everyone will have a great support system, and will be fully accepted by their community after they have the courage to come out. But the sad reality is, that is just not going to be the case for some people. If you feel like there is a chance that you will lose much needed support after coming out, you should do your best to plan your future before coming out. Get a job, any job that will have you and works with your schedule. Save as much money as humanly possible. On top of that, you can start DoorDashing if you are old enough, or you could take a longer approach and start a blog or other business that could eventually become a source of income.

If someone is paying for your schooling, you need to consider how coming out will affect this, as well. If there is a risk of losing your support you either need to save enough to support yourself, hold off on coming out until you have an income that can support you (which I hate to recommend, but could make sense for some situations), or just accept that you may have to take a break from school to save some money. You could do like I did, take a break from college until you are 24 and your parents are no longer legally required to be a factor in paying for your education.

2. If you feel it necessary to medically transition, this opens up a whole can of worms. You may need regular medical care for the rest of your life, surgery (or surgeries), and time off from work to recover from each surgery.

If you are in the US, you may be familiar with the dismal state in which we find our current healthcare and insurance systems. I am currently insured under my mother's plan through her work, but I don't use it. It is very hard to find a doctor in my area that accepts the insurance. Even if I wanted to, I would still have to pay a copay that is way out of my price range. My mother, who makes well over six figures annually, complains about how high the copays are with this plan, that she chose. But she chose the cheapest monthly plan, and only insures me because she feels she has to as I am not yet 26 years old. Suffice it to say, I feel like I don't have health insurance, because I can't afford the insurance I have. It is for this reason alone that I have yet to pursue medical transition. I have had to chose between legal transition and medical transition, and I have chosen to save for the legal costs first.

3. You should be planning for the fees associated with legally transitioning.

I plan on doing a whole article on this topic alone, because it is that important. The legal transition process can be arcane and opaque depending on the state in which you currently reside and the state in which you were born. Personally, I currently live in California, which is primarily concerned with getting paid. If you have the money, and fill out the forms correctly, you can legally transition tomorrow. It will take awhile to process the paperwork, but it really is that simple to begin with. If you were born in California you could have your birth certificate updated during this process, but if you were not, like me, things get a little more complicated. Unfortunately, I was born in Virginia. This means that in order to change my name, and gender on my birth certificate I will have to submit a court order from California that demonstrates this change. This just adds one more thing to the laundry list of other documents that need to be changed, some of which can cost money to replace depending on where you live.

4. You may feel that you need to build a secondary income stream, at least part time.

I always recommend a secondary income source. It is just foolish to rely entirely on one job at a time to support all of your financial well being. In this day and age, this kind of thinking just isn't possible, for anyone. But those people who find themselves anywhere outside the gender binary may feel that they need to build some way to bring in money outside of their day job because they may struggle to find or keep a day job at all. Historically, members of the trans community have resorted to illegal means of making money i.e. certain kinds of sex work, just to survive, and unfortunately, this continues in a lot places to this day. While you may not find yourself resorting to sex work, you may still struggle to find and keep a job because up until June of 2020 it was perfectly legal on the federal level in the US to fire, demote, refuse to hire, or otherwise discriminate against someone who identified as transgender. There were some states of the union that extended legal protections to the trans community before 2020, but there were plenty more that didn't. Local sentiments about the trans community and awareness of this change in labor laws will take even longer to get up to speed with the times. You may feel unsafe in your workplace, even if no material punishment befalls you. You may be subject to insidious forms of harassment, such as deadnaming, misgendering, and being made the butt of inappropriate jokes. This kind of harassment is difficult to stop, especially if you end up in a workplace where management is ill informed on trans specific types of harassment. A secondary income stream could provide a small cushion while you leave this type of workplace and find a new, more understanding one. If you didn't have a little something on the side, you may be forced to stay in this trauma inducing workplace, which is something I hope no one has to endure.

5. Family planning can get complicated, and thus, expensive.

Any family planning option that is outside of the standard heterosexual manner is automatically expensive because it enters the realm of the medical; anyone who has suffered from infertility can attest to this. If you find yourself wanting children of your own, you have a few options depending on your sex at birth. If you were born male, you will have to find someone to donate an egg, and someone to birth the baby. If you have a willing, and healthy friend this option can be relatively close to the heterosexual, cisgender experience. But many people find that they have to find and purchase a set of eggs from a donor, and then have them incubated and placed via IVF into a surrogate. This is an incredibly expensive process, so much so that it oftentimes prohibits people who would otherwise be wonderful parents from having biological children.

If you were assigned female at birth, things become a bit more complicated, and can depend entirely on your comfort with your own biology. I personally will never have biological children, for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is I have no desire to be pregnant, or birth children. My fiancee did for a very long time, and we decided that should we pursue biological children they would be entirely hers. But even if we did, sperm is not cheap, and not at all guaranteed to work. It is perfectly normal for a heterosexual, cisgender couple to find that it takes them close to a year to successfully conceive. This means that you could feasibly spend over $800 per month, for 12 months before pursuing other means such as IVF. A typical round of IVF could cost upwards of $10,000. Even if you have a kind friend that agrees to donate some sperm, you still have to have a contract drawn up to facilitate this transaction, adding legal fees to this process.

6. Your financial priorities change overall.

Finance first piqued my interest during a time in my life when I had no money. When I say no money, I mean no money, and no way of making money on my own. No computer, intermittent access to a working mobile phone, no job prospects, nothing. I found myself in a position of powerlessness, and decided that once I had money I never wanted to be broke again. A lot of people who find themselves on the margins of society find that money is never far out of mind. It is just our reality. It would behoove everyone, but especially those for which society has little or no tolerance, to figure out how to effectively manage money. But from what I have seen cis and hetero people who take an interest in money management, finance, and business more broadly tend to approach these tools as a means of creating wealth, whereas people who find themselves marginalized tend to see money as means of attaining that ever elusive sense of material safety. It is a small but, important distinction. Things such as food, transportation, and reliable and safe housing are extremely important goals for which genderqueer people can spend their entire lives striving. These experiences of material deprivation scar you, and reshuffle your priorities, usually with safety and stability right at the top. This can prevent someone from taking material risks the way that cis/hetero people can. Risks such as buying a house, seeking education beyond the minimum legally required by one's profession, and starting a family can seem too expensive for people who have different ideas of what is “the worst that could happen”. These same people may not necessarily have family that is able to lend them money, or other material support. A supportive community is the key to stability in almost every sense, and up until very recently, most of this country seemed hell bent on denying access to a supportive community to genderqueer individuals.

Wrapping it all up