% Help Leah, founder of Libreboot, get Gender Reassignment Surgery
% Leah Rowe
% 19 April 2018

I spoke with Andrew Robbins and Swift Geek on #libreboot IRC. These are two
other members of the core Libreboot community. This news post was submitted to
Pull Request, subject to their approval before publishing on libreboot.org.

My name is Leah Rowe, and I'm the founder of the Libreboot project. I’m a 26
year old British trans woman, living in the UK. After a lifetime of
repression and denial, I came out as transgender in June 2016; I
began living full-time as my true self for the first time. This was my coming
out message to the Libreboot community:
<https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-05/msg00004.html>

I need help from the community in order to to pay for my Gender Reassignment
Surgery. Here is my fundraiser:
<https://vimuser.org/surgery/>

I'm unable to pay for it myself. 2 years ago, I paid 90,000 USD to Raptor
Engineering to port the ASUS KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 to Libreboot as well as 4000
AUD to Damien Zammit for the Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L and Intel D510MO ports.
Besides this, I've spent huge amounts of money in general on development of my
own and I've dedicated countless hours to this project. I love Libreboot
and I love working on it. For instance, I ported the ThinkPad X200 (later T400,
T500 etc) to Libreboot myself, working alongside Steve Shenton to free it from
the Intel ME firmware. Unfortunately, this has left me severely out of pocket
and, even now, I can't afford to pay for the things I need for myself such as
this.

As a direct result of my contributions, the Free Software community is in a
much better state than it was.
The [Free Software Foundation](https://www.fsf.org/) now hosts fsf.org and
[gnu.org](https://www.gnu.org/), as well as
[GNU Savannah](https://savannah.gnu.org/) (used by many GNU projects, for code
hosting and collaboration) on ASUS KGPE-D16
servers, running Libreboot. Additionally, both the Free Software Foundation and
[Software Freedom Conservancy](https://sfconservancy.org/) use Libreboot laptops
almost exclusively in their offices. Thousands of people now use Libreboot.
Projects inspired by Libreboot have also appeared such as the
[TALOS II workstation](https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/).

I greatly appreciate any help that the community can give me, no matter how
big or small. It will mean a great deal to me, and allow me to focus on my
passions, including Libreboot.
