i'm a trans woman who moved from oklahoma to seattle washington in 2020. i did this, as you might imagine, because it seemed pretty obvious that things were only going to get worse for trans people in oklahoma, and the political will to fight back was too fractured and spread out. this wasn't just about access to hrt (which, contrary to what you'd expect, i got my hands on legally with no fuss at all from a very supportive women's clinic), it was about safety. i was born in oklahoma, and though i've lived in a few other places for long stretches of time oklahoma is where i spent my 20s, where i went to college, where i became who i am today. i have family there. i have memories of wandering around at the edge of nowhere (always only a few minutes away, since i couldn't afford to live near the city), letting my thoughts roll out over the land and fill it up and become part of my mental landscape. the place has a nasty history, but it also has a wonderful history. it is not a static place, it can change, it can get better, i always believed that was possible and i wanted to STAY and try to help it get better.
but in 2020 i chose to leave. doing so was absurdly expensive. i had to rent a uhaul box to ship all my stuff across country (and i still had to leave a few things behind, most of which i regret), and all told that cost somewhere in the range of $2000. add to that the flight and the cost of the airbnb i stayed at until my friends in seattle helped me find a place, you're looking at a cool $3500. which isn't, in the grand scheme of things, that expensive for a total move across state lines without a car. but it was still more money than i'd ever had in my bank account at any one time. and that's just me. that's me moving myself and no one else, not having to prove my income to anyone on the other end of the line. if i didn't have friends in seattle able to keep me housed for a while, it would have been impossible to stay here.
i was only able to afford the cost of the move by leveraging the meager following i'd gained through 2018 & 2019 as a podcaster slash video essayist slash opinion-haver. if i didn't have as many followers on twitter as i did, or if i'd waited a few years and tried to do the same fundraising NOW, the whole thing would've been a nonstarter. and even with that luck I barely made it.
this is what runs through my head every time someone talks about queer people needing to get out of conservative-run states. it's as though some people think, because you don't have to go through a formal immigration process to move between states, the whole process is negligible. just pick up your stuff and settle somewhere else!
set aside that the distance between a terrible red state and an explicitly queer-friendly blue state typically runs in the thousands of miles. set aside the hassle of packing up everything you own for a trip that long, the likelihood of not having enough space to take everything with you, and the sheer scheduling nightmare that is lining up the end of one lease with the start of another across state lines. let's not even consider the exponential increase of that cost and effort if you have a partner or children, if you have medical issues that require a specialist, if you need to find a new job, new school, new friends, new everything.
even pretending these are all a nonissue, we must confront the motivation behind the move. because it's not just "going somewhere else." i didn't leave oklahoma out of boredom or for better career prospects. i left oklahoma, my home, because i had good reason to fear for my safety in the long-term if i stayed. in 2020 i would've said i was just being cautious, that it wasn't likely to really come to a head for another five to ten years, if ever. but there was a chance, right? and now here we are, with states all over trying to legislate trans people out of existence, with politicians openly inciting their base to commit violence against us. i feel so lucky to have gotten out when i did.
now imagine someone who's only reached that tipping point now, at a moment when the cost of living has skyrocketed everywhere because the federal government refuses to do anything about profit-driven corporations raising their prices under the guise of inflation (hey remember when richard fucking nixon signed a law that banned arbitrary price increases to fight inflation hahaha lol). how is any queer person, extremely likely to be poor and neurodivergent and mentally unwell, supposed to flee a hostile state under these conditions? crowdfunding can't make up for it, especially not with twitter going the way it has. what are they actually supposed to DO?
at some point we have to talk about the trauma inherent to leaving a place you might've called home because something about you has become a target of hatred. sure, we don't have to go through an explicit immigration process. like most things in america, the possibility of infinite transformation is available to all... who can afford it. which makes it feel that much worse when you can't, because in america we're taught that how much money you make is directly proportional to your worth as a human being. so if you're poor you're worthless, and if you're queer you're hated. there's nowhere to go. there is no escape. not without help.
what i do not understand about this moment we are in is the silence among elected officials in explicitly trans-friendly states, like washington. imagine the waves that could be made if instead of plastering a cheap pride flag that still has its creases in the windows of the capitol or whatever, politicians made it a political imperative to depress rent and cost of living, to provide unconditional financial help to interamerican expatriots fleeing fascist states. even if such a thing is quite literally politically impossible in the current environment, imagine a governor or senator or president just saying such a thing. saying that such a thing ought to be a priority not for its profitability, not for its effect on the GDP or jobs growth or what the fuck ever, but because it's the right and necessary thing to do.
it's not enough to just say "the red states are bad and doing fascism," we need an actual vocal committed opposition. which is entirely what we're missing in politics as a whole. the democrats are aligned with the landlords and corporate profiteers who donate to their campaigns and give their failsons jobs, same as the republicans. biden's administration is actively choosing to let thousands of people get sick with covid every single day, an illness that has a high probability of killing or permanently disabling you EVEN WHEN YOU ARE VACCINATED, why they have done nothing to undo the trump administration's awful choices the way the trump admin undid everything obama ever touched. the democrats want to say the right things so they can keep looking like the good guys, but if joe biden or jay inslee or another major national dnc politician really cared about trans people they could AT LEAST use the fucking bully pulpit instead of acting like every human being on earth is a crystallized ideological specimen whose views & opinions are permanently fixed.
if only we had an organized and well-funded political vanguard that could direct the will of the people on a mass scale. but this is the nature of economic monarchy in a functionally unregulated free market where every idea is an opportunity for rent-seeking, every exchange of information an opportunity for a bridge troll. we act like none of this is political, because we've been taught that economics is neutral, objective, detached. but these are choices our leaders make, and even if the apparatus of the government is dysfunctional these people HAVE voices. the fascists are using their voices to great effect! but not the democrats. of course not. after all, some of their best friends are fascists
