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+news/leah-fundraiser.md
 news/libreplanet2018-workshop.md
 news/release-testing-20171221.md
 news/lenovo-recall.md
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+% Help Leah, founder of Libreboot, get Gender Reassignment Surgery
+% Leah Rowe
+% 19 April 2017
+
+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.