Happy New Year! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Toby, and I’m a trans man. I’m saving up money for surgery, and this is the year of my operation! On April 26 I will be getting top surgery with a local surgeon, and by April 12th I’ll need to pay the surgery fee in full. Currently we have $1400 raised (which is amazing!) and I will be able to raise $2000 of my own money for the purpose of paying off the surgery. The total is $5900, which means I only have to raise about $2500 more through generous donations to be able to meet my goals! 

Please, if you can, share this fundraiser as much as you are able in the next few months, so I can get maximum reach. This will be my post for the year of 2019, I won’t be remaking them every month this time (that was probably a bit counter-intuitive). If you can donate I would be extremely grateful, but if you can’t, reblogging it or crossposting it on your other social media would be a huge help as well. 

Thank you again to all of you who have donated and shared so far, and thank you to those of you who will do so in the upcoming months!

The moral halo around “good skin” isn’t a coincidence. The behaviors associated with a clear, even-toned complexion require those who want it to reject hedonism in a way that is still deeply ingrained as virtuous in American culture; that the wealthy have mastered the look reinforces capitalistic notions of success and who achieves it (the ascetic, dedicated, and hardworking). The journalist Jaya Saxena found as much when she investigated the connections between skin and poverty earlier this year. “We assume those at the top are there because they’ve done something right. And if they have straight teeth, toned bodies, and smooth skin, that must be ‘right’ too,” she wrote. “It’s not that we think having bad skin is a moral failing. It’s that we think poverty is.”