As gender-affirming care gets harder to access under Trump, trans people turn to GoFundMe

As lawmakers debate restrictions on transgender health care and insurers tighten coverage, the cost of gender-affirming treatment is climbing, and for many, access is becoming not just expensive but increasingly uncertain.

In response, a growing number of transgender people are turning to crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, not only to bridge financial gaps but to publicly stake a claim to care that can feel politically and financially out of reach.

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Ahead of Transgender Day of Visibility, several people told The Advocate that sharing their stories online has become both a practical necessity and a deeply personal act that brings them closer to the care they have long pursued.

Medical crowdfunding has surged in recent years, with patients across the United States increasingly relying on online campaigns to cover gaps left by insurance, high deductibles, and uneven state-level access to care. For transgender people, those financial pressures often intersect with rapidly shifting political restrictions.

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For Jack Lea, that moment arrived earlier this month. Four days after undergoing top surgery in California, Lea described a sense of relief that outweighed the physical toll of recovery. “I’m feeling emotionally fantastic,” he said. “I’m so relieved and at peace with myself and with my body. Physically, it has been rough, but that’s just surgery.”

The path to that moment, however, was far from straightforward.

Lea began planning for surgery in late 2024 but faced a cascade of setbacks: a breakup, the loss of one job, and an insurance change that left him responsible for more than $4,500 in out-of-pocket costs.

“I’m still grateful [the majority was] covered, but that was still more than I was expecting, and someone told me you should start a GoFundMe,” Lea said.

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He had already saved enough to cover most of the expense. The fundraiser, with a modest goal of $1,000, was meant to soften the blow of lost income during five weeks of recovery and unexpected medical bills. By late last week, it had raised about $700 — not including additional contributions sent directly after friends saw his posts on social media.

Just as important as the financial help, Lea said, was the sense of community. Through friends, he came to see crowdfunding not simply as a last resort but as a way for people, many of them strangers, to show up at a pivotal moment in someone’s life.

Others have seen that support scale quickly. A campaign to fund top surgery for Soph Opatz raised nearly $3,700. The page was started by Opatz’s fiancé, Ali DeMeo, who initially hoped to surprise them by raising enough money for the procedure.

“It's been a dream of theirs, but the only thing stopping them has been the financial part of it,” DeMeo told The Advocate. “It’s not only paying for the price of the top surgery, but they have to pay for appointments before and after, and they have to take time off work. It’s just really hard to watch someone that I love experience gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia. I just personally couldn’t sit around and not do anything. I just started a GoFundMe because it felt like something that I could do to make a difference.”

After DeMeo posted about the campaign on TikTok, donations took off. While DeMeo expected contributions would mostly come from people who knew Opatz personally, the campaign also drew support from across the queer community.

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“I got a lot of people that I had never met before just donating out of the kindness of their hearts from the internet because it was something that they related to, or they could just see through the screen how good a person Soph was,” DeMeo said.

DeMeo could not keep the surprise to themselves for long and showed the campaign to Opatz, who then shared it on their social media. By that point, the page had raised about $1,000 in a week, and it continued to grow after Opatz posted it. The support has felt especially urgent as Opatz worries the window for care could narrow.

“Honestly, with this current administration, it's getting a little scary for people like me,” Opatz said. “I fear that, you know, the opportunity will be, at some point, taken away from me. So I just feel like I want to do it sooner rather than later.”

For others, politics has added new complications and new costs. Fern Keenan, a nonbinary person in Texas who faces barriers to seeking gender-affirming surgery in their home state, launched a campaign to cover both medical expenses and travel to Guadalajara, Mexico, for care.

“The gender affirming care in the United States is just not safe, especially right now, because they're trying to pass laws to ban it entirely for adults as well,” Keenan said.

Keenan set a GoFundMe goal of $10,000. As of late last week, the campaign had raised $240, but Keenan said the goal was aspirational. They hope the surgery itself will cost less than that, but the total must also cover travel and aftercare. Even so, the campaign marks a step toward a procedure the 24-year-old has wanted since they were 19.

Another Texan, Tommy Nouansacksy, has raised more than $4,600 through GoFundMe, far more than they expected. Initially, Nouansacksy sought $600 for laser treatment as part of gender-affirming care, primarily for their face. Now, they are also considering other procedures, including hair transplants to alter their hairline, something that once felt like a distant possibility.

One of the biggest surprises for Nouansacksy was how much support came not from strangers, but from people they had known for years. The Austin-based DJ and drag performer only came out publicly as transgender last year, and when they posted their GoFundMe campaign to Instagram, it was the first time many colleagues had learned about their transition.

“I was out to a few close friends, but this is the first time I came out to anybody in the general public about being trans and nonbinary,” Nouansacksy told The Advocate. Soon, friends from high school were donating to the campaign.

“I was nervous about backlash and asking for money in general. I said I was not forcing anybody to donate, just if you can, send something my way. I got a lot more positive reaction than any negative reaction.”