A Boston-based fraternity that started a campaign to raise money for a pledge’s sex reassignment surgery has now raised 10 times its goal and may even have helped change its school’s insurance policy.
Donnie Collins, a Phi Alpha Tau brother at Boston’s Emerson College, identifies as male and will receive what is called a top surgery. It’s a female-to-male sex reassignment operation that involves removing the female breasts and shaping a male-contoured chest.
“While it started out as a really cool story, I can now feel that it’s not about me personally, it’s not even about Greek life. It’s about helping a community that really needs help,” Collins said in a YouTube video posted Feb. 25.
The surgery will cost roughly $8,000, Collins said. Initially, he believed his school’s insurance policy would cover all but $2,000 of the surgery. However he later learned that this accommodation never made it into the insurance policy and he would have to pay full price.
When he learned this, the brothers of Phi Alpha Tau, which he is now a member of, started an online crowd-sourced fundraising campaign with Indiegogo.
The goal was $2,000. Currently, 1,000 donors have raised more than $20,000. The campaign ends April 7.
“It kind of blew up,” Collins said. “We started getting so many donations— more than we knew what to do with.”
While that money was, and still is, coming in, Collins posted a YouTube video March 6 with an important update: the school’s insurance policy had been re-worded to cover the surgery.
“This is amazing. Out of all the money we raised, I’m only going to have to use about $2,000 dollars,” he said.
The fraternity said all excess funds will go to the Jim Collins foundation, a charity providing financial assistance to transgender people for gender-confirming surgeries.
The foundation released a statement saying they were grateful for the donation, and encouraged more insurance companies to follow suit by covering the “medically necessary procedure.”
“The risk of harm from denial of health care for transgender people is very real,” the statement read.
Collins said he has been “overwhelmed” with the amount of media attention. The campaign has been reported by the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, and Macleans, among others.
Collins said for anxiety reasons he would no longer be conducting media interviews.
“This surgery is going to become a reality for me, and it’s also going to become a reality for other people,” he said.
