Life grants

I was just pondering the rant I wrote the other day--the one posted just below this post--and the feelings of anger and frustration it brought up. They weren't directed towards Barbie, really. While I found the general attitude towards life that she exuded to be incredibly vapid and distasteful, her self-absorption wasn't my biggest beef.

It was the thought that so much miscommunication and displaced frustration gets slung around at the people closest to us. Because honestly, we don't need infighting. We don't need to police ourselves. We need to band together, because god damn it, it's hard being trans in this country! As if the very real social stigma of gender plasticity weren't enough, many--if not most--of us have to struggle with the additional expenses involved in modifying our gender and sex. (Here I must give props to Zane for getting my gears turning by posting on facebook about the various expenses of getting his transition letters.) We're talking makeup, clothing, shoes, hair removal, binders, hormones, doctor visits, therapy, surgery...it adds up!

When I dwell on the difficulties of life for too long in one sitting, I have to kick back and imagine a world where those difficulties don't exist, just to keep optimistic. Sometimes those fantasies are solely that: fantastical. But sometimes--my hope is that it happens more often than not--certain pragmatic solutions will come to my mind. As the last week of class before finals draws to a close and my mind is consumed with study, I thought...

I wonder if there exists a group of forward-thinking benefactors of the future who provide "life grants". They would be similar to college scholarships in that they would fund an individual's pursuit of higher education, except education being funded would be of a much more material and lasting sort. It would be a way to, as the teachings of the Oracle of Delphi would beseech us to do, better know ourselves.

Or better yet, get some of those Obamabucks into funding Pell grants for transfolk! I can think of nothing more adherent to the first amendment--that is, nothing more American--than to support the right of transpeople to speak with a mouth, to present with a body, that most accurately matches the mind that does the speaking.

Does anybody know if there is a precedent for this? Have banks, for example, ever given loans with the express purpose of being spent on transitioning? Are grants given for educational pursuits that are not sanctioned by any major college, as a sort of "DIY higher ed"? And if so, how could gender transition be presented such that it would satisfy the requirements?

And if nothing currently exists that would even vaguely satisfy my curiosity, then I say...

Come! O siblings of all shapes and sizes, genders and genes! Come! and let us begin to form financial bonds amongst us, such that we might offer the transchildren of the future a better life, the sort of life we no doubt wish we had ourselves! Let us not tarry, but make haste towards our full self-realization, to finish our education, to emerge lettered and powerful into the world so that we might shape it to our fancy! Let us emerge AT ONCE!

*Ahem*...sorry, got a little olde schoole there.

"Genders and genes." I like that! With "genes" substituting for "sex". Get it?? Well don't, it's mine, you can't have it, nyah!