Transgender Americans weigh leaving U.S. over Trump’s policies. Some already have
- Share via
- Transgender Americans fear a slate of Trump administration policies targeting gender-affirming medical care and U.S. passports that recognize their identities.
- Many are now making plans to flee the country, or have already done so. They are saving money, getting travel documents in order, considering foreign jobs and even applying for asylum abroad.
Alexia Nunez presumed “things were going to be pretty bad” for transgender people under President Trump, given his campaign rhetoric, but had decided to stick it out in the U.S. “as long as possible.”
Her breaking point came just days after Trump’s inauguration, she said, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the suspension of passport applications seeking a gender marker different from an applicant’s birth sex.
Nunez, a 46-year-old software engineer originally from San Diego, called the directive the “definition of discrimination against a marginalized community,” and a direct threat to her safety as a transgender woman.
Although her passport has reflected her female identity since 2016, it expires next year. Suddenly, she feared renewing it would leave her without a travel document that matched her identity and appearance, and without a means of fleeing the country if things in the U.S. grew increasingly hostile.
“I knew it was time to enact my emergency plan,” Nunez said.
Transgender Americans and their families are reaching similar conclusions across the country amid numerous anti-transgender policies from the Trump administration. They include directives to defund or even criminalize gender-affirming medical care, punish teachers who support gender nonconforming kids at school, ban transgender people from bathrooms and sports teams, and cast doubt not only on their legal documents but their very existence.
Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office declaring that the U.S. recognizes only “two sexes, male and female,” which are “not changeable.” The order called the idea people can change genders a “false claim” that endangers women, and directed federal agencies to strip “gender ideology” from their regulations and policies.
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.
A Riverside high school has become a key battleground in the raging national debate over transgender youth in sports. Two transgender girls at the center of the firestorm describe a harrowing few months.
Although many of Trump’s proposed policies are being challenged in court, the fear and panic they have evoked is already widespread.
Both transgender adults and parents of transgender kids are comparing the risks of staying versus those of leaving. They are calculating the financial costs of moving versus the mental, emotional and physical costs of staying.
They are also eyeing asylum claims abroad and other potential paths to securing foreign visas, such as through work, schooling, lineage, real estate investments or other cash commitments. Those who can afford it are hiring lawyers and relocation specialists.
The one thing they are not considering, they said, is going back into the closet.
“Right now I am in a prison within my own country. Before I transitioned I was in a prison inside myself,” said K.D., a transgender man in Orange County who is considering fleeing. “I would rather be who I am without apology [than] hide for my own safety.”
K.D. and others requested to be identified only by their initials due to harassment of transgender people and for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.
The increased fear and interest in fleeing marks a stunning reversal for queer rights in the U.S., but also for the nation’s standing in the world as a relative haven for LGBTQ+ people.
LGBTQ+ refugees have long fled to the U.S., not from it. The process has never been easy, but people facing violence, arrest or even death in their home countries due to their LGBTQ+ identities have successfully claimed asylum on those grounds in the U.S. since the 1990s. A 2021 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law found that, between 2012 and 2017, LGBTQ+ people from 84 countries filed 3,899 asylum claims in the U.S. based specifically on their persecution for being queer.
President Biden had ramped up U.S. efforts to defend LGBTQ+ rights and protect queer asylum seekers and refugees. In contrast to Trump’s recent orders, Biden issued a memorandum in 2021 stating that the U.S. would “lead by the power of our example in the cause of advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world.”
The ground has clearly shifted.
Preparing to leave
Determining how many transgender Americans are considering fleeing, or have already fled, is difficult, though LGBTQ+ and immigration advocates, travel advisors and queer families told The Times that the impulse is widespread in their networks.
A recent Gallup poll found about 1.3% of U.S. adults identify as transgender. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the Trump administration’s passport policies in court, said it was contacted by more than 1,500 concerned transgender people or family members.
K.D. said he has been preparing to leave since Trump won. Three days after the election, he gave up his apartment to save more money. In late December, he obtained an updated passport. But he also has doubts.
K.D. said he has realized he “did not do enough homework” on how to leave, which now seems less straightforward. Saving money has been hard despite downsizing, and he has struggled with the idea of leaving others behind, wondering: “Am I betraying the values that I try to live by if I run?”
The executive order conflicts with laws in California and other blue states that forbid discrimination based on gender identity. The courts are expected to take up the issue.
He said he has thought a lot about the Holocaust and other genocides, and his view that the Trump administration is trying to “erase” transgender people. He told himself he needed to “draw a line in the sand” for when he must leave, lest he regret it.
But Trump has blown through the lines K.D. set — at gender-affirming care being threatened, at passports being suspended — so quickly that it’s felt impossible to react, he said. “I recognize that I am a frog in a pot of boiling water.”
J.G., an attorney in Los Angeles and the father of a transgender high schooler, said many families of transgender kids feel similarly. “We knew it was coming. We just didn’t know it was going to be in fifth gear,” he said.
He and his wife have scrambled to respond. They had already changed the gender marker on their son’s passport, but it still has his deadname — or the name he used before his transition. They’re working to get his name legally changed and his birth certificate updated in California, and hoping that will be enough to update his passport without new questions arising.
J.G. has heard of other families having trouble, and wakes at night worried. His son, 15, is “very aware” of what’s happening but wants his parents to figure it out. J.G. said he wants that too — wants to shield his son from the burden. But it’s been heavy, as has the recognition that they could soon be living in separate countries.
“I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but the fact that we are having serious conversations and taking steps to smooth that path, it’s like being on a tightrope,” he said. “I can’t look down on that one, because it’s overwhelming.”
Already abroad
G.R., 21, first faced anti-transgender hate years ago, when he and his mother started advocating for trans rights in Texas, where they lived.
After he left for college out of state, he told his mom he didn’t ever want to return to Texas. Soon, she and G.R.’s now-fiance started thinking in similar terms.
The trio quickly landed on moving to New Zealand, which has LGBTQ+-friendly policies, visa programs for students and paths to permanent residency for workers in certain fields, including nursing.
G.R. went first, arriving in Auckland in February 2023 after being accepted into a university nursing program. He’s set to graduate in December and start a career that should allow him to remain in the country, and maybe even sponsor his mom and fiance.
They arrived with the family’s three dogs and four cats in June 2023, both on student visas of their own. His mom, a social worker pursuing a graduate degree, has since gotten a job.
The move took a lot of paperwork, but it’s all been worth it, G.R. said. He feels “vindicated” given how many people told them they were “overreacting” by fleeing, and happier than he has ever been. Six months after arriving in New Zealand, he stopped taking the anti-depressants he’d been on for years.
“I felt safe, like fully safe, for the first time,” he said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s win after a virulently anti-transgender campaign has left many queer and transgender people especially frightened about the future.
H.R., a trauma therapist and mother of two from California, said her family had a similar experience.
Her younger daughter, 7, came out as transgender about three years ago, just as legislation targeting gender-affirming care and the parents of kids receiving it began cropping up in state legislatures across the country.
H.R. said the threats awoke a “get-away response” in her, and she told her husband she would “rather get out and think, ‘Well, that was extreme,’” than remain in the U.S. and have their daughter’s healthcare suddenly revoked.
They began looking for options to move abroad soon after. When her husband — who works in aerospace engineering — got a job in New Zealand, they picked up and moved, arriving in September.
She said that she knows her family is “super privileged,” but that it was still “devastatingly sad to be forced from your home.”
“We have family, we have aging parents, we had a dog that couldn’t come with us because of her breed,” she said.
Still, with Trump “going nuclear on trans people,” she said, she knows it was the right call.
Haven no more?
Bridget Crawford, director of law and policy for Immigration Equality, an organization that helps LGBTQ+ refugees escape deadly violence and state-sanctioned discrimination, said the U.S. under Biden had been working hard to “increase the bandwidth” to resettle LGBTQ+ people in danger abroad.
Trump threatened that progress on Day One in office, she said, issuing an executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
The order, which is being challenged in court, immediately halted refugee claims around the world, including from LGBTQ+ people in extreme danger who had received conditional approval to immigrate to the U.S., Crawford said. Rubio followed it up with another directive targeting transgender athletes and other visa applicants, suggesting they could be barred from the country for allegedly misrepresenting their sex.
One refugee, a queer Ugandan, spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because he remains in danger after suffering violent threats in Uganda and another brutal attack in Kenya, where he’d fled and remains.
He applied to come to the U.S., proved his case, received conditional approval, passed background and medical checks, and was just waiting for a final medical review when Trump won and the U.S. government went silent, he said.
He was crushed, he said.
Crawford said Immigration Equality has a transgender client in Saudi Arabia who was meant to be on a flight to the U.S. a few days before Trump’s inauguration, was delayed because of a mix-up with her travel documentation, and is now stranded despite “actively being hunted.”
Crawford said another transgender client from Somalia was recently murdered in Kenya.
“This is really not hyperbole when we talk about the impact on refugees,” she said. “It’s a campaign of cruelty.”
Frightened LGBTQ+ Ugandans are searching for a way to escape a new law prescribing the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality.’
Ari Shaw, director of international programs at the Williams Institute, said LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, who have detailed similar violence in dozens of countries for decades, are facing similar roadblocks, with far-reaching effects.
“As the U.S. moves away from that sort of welcoming environment — and also reflects a broader global rollback of LGBTQ rights — queer refugees have fewer options in terms of where they can go to be safe,” Shaw said.
The Ugandan refugee said it has been bizarre to watch LGBTQ+ rights deteriorate in the country he has longed to reach, but he would still leave for the U.S. tomorrow if he could, he said — a sentiment that refugee and asylum attorneys said is common among their LGBTQ+ clients.
Experiencing brutal anti-LGBTQ+ violence is one thing, but feeling you have no legal recourse or government support to challenge it “shatters your soul,” the Ugandan refugee said. And in the U.S., he said, “I don’t think I’d feel that powerless.”
Looking ahead
A week after deciding to leave the U.S., Nunez, the software engineer, arrived in Montreal with two suitcases of essentials: clothes, laptop, a photograph of her fiance and a three-month supply of her gender-affirming hormones. She also brought her Xbox, a distraction from “doomscrolling too much,” she said.
Nunez applied for asylum as an LGBTQ+ refugee and met with Canadian officials, who on Feb. 17 referred her case to the country’s Refugee Protection Division. She was granted temporary status to remain in the country until her next hearing — which she was told could take months, if not longer.
LGBTQ migrants face extortion, death threats and assault after they’re sent south of the border
Despite having uprooted her life in Rhode Island — she and her fiance have been together seven years — Nunez said she was overjoyed.
She knows her asylum claim could still be denied but believes she has a strong case. For now, “I’m going to be safe and sound in Canada for the time being,” she said.
She kept her remote U.S. job but is otherwise settling into a new life. She’s looking for a local doctor, researching how her fiance might join her, and trying to learn French.
“It will just take time,” she said, “to feel like this is more of a permanent home.”
Sign up for This Evening's Big Stories
Catch up on the day with the 7 biggest L.A. Times stories in your inbox every weekday evening.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
