580 boxes went to trans ohioans this year, from a nonprofit two people started with $500

via The Buckeye Flame, reported by H.L. Comeriato, and The Advocate.

Ohio banned most gender-affirming medical care for trans young people in 2024, including most talk and family therapy, and the clinics across the state stopped treating them. Nobody replaced any of it. What happened instead is that Ohioans went looking, and what they found was two people in Jacksonville, Florida.

what a build-a-queer kit holds

The Queer Trans Project was started in 2021 by Cielo Sunsarae and Alexis Williams with a $500 grant. It gives away free customized care packages called Build-a-Queer kits. You pick what goes in: chest binders, packing underwear, GenderGrip tape, silicone packers, chest forms, gaffs, makeup, health bundles. There is no standard masculine box and no standard feminine box, which is the point of letting a person fill it in themselves. Community members write letters by hand and those go in too.

Since 2021 the project has sent out more than $1 million in gender-affirming items, to all fifty states and the territories.

This year in Ohio alone: more than 580 kits, worth close to $30,000 in supplies, and more than 20,000 visits to the website from people in the state. Williams told the Buckeye Flame that the organization does no marketing in Ohio. The traffic is organic, mostly off social media and Reddit. People are finding it and telling each other.

why trans ohioans thought it was a scam

It took years for that to be possible at all. "Trans people thought we were a scam and that we were going to take the information and harm them," Williams said. Which is a rational thing to think, if you are a trans person in a state that has spent several years passing laws about you, and a stranger on the internet offers to mail you a box.

Williams also named the gap nobody funds: "People aren't seeing the importance of social transition, like using binders and packers." Everything in the fight is aimed at prescriptions and surgery. A binder is not a prescription. It is forty dollars, it is the difference between leaving the house and not, and there is no law that can ban a shipping label.

the pilots who fly people out

The project also partners with Elevated Access, a network of volunteer pilots who fly trans and non-binary people, free, to healthcare outside their own county or state. Small planes, ordinary pilots, no charge.

None of this is a substitute for a clinic, and nobody there pretends it is. Ohio is not finished either: HB 838, from Republican Rep. Josh Williams of Sylvania Township, would make it the tenth state to bar Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for trans adults.

Still. Two people, five hundred dollars, and five years later a state that took the clinics away is getting five hundred and eighty boxes anyway.