Don’t Do to Me What You Did to America: Why I Fled the Country
I have loved you, I have grieved.
I'm ashamed to admit I no longer believe.
-- Sufjan Stevens, "America"
I write from 35,000 feet above somewhere on Earth. Where I am, and where I and my family are going, don’t particularly matter, so much as where we’re leaving, perhaps for good: The United States of America, the country we were raised to believe is the greatest on Earth.
For a long time I’ve rolled my eyes at the “That’s it, I’m moving to Canada” stuff. Well-off liberals threatened it under Bush, under a hypothetical McCain or Palin or Romney presidency, under Trump the first time, and now again. And frankly I think fleeing the country because you disagree with the politics of the guy in charge is stupid.
I have an eclectic and esoteric political philosophy. It’s unlikely the U.S. will ever have a president whose politics I solidly like. But politics isn’t everything. I live (… lived. sigh) in a county Trump won three times in a row by 15- to 20-point margins. I never had trouble with anyone there. At the local gun store, which sells Trump merch and bans face masks, the only acknowledgment of my and my wife’s queerness came when the range safety officer, a retired cop, asked if I minded if he put his hand on her shoulder to correct her stance. When I went down to Florida to see my other wife’s family before we left for good, I stayed up till 2 AM getting drunk with her brother and talking conservative politics. There is something to be said for just getting along with who you get along with, politics be damned. I find that many objections to being around conservatives stem more from classism than any ideological complaint—as evidenced from how often liberals complain about people driving pickups, watching NASCAR, or listening to country music, with this supposedly sufficing as evidence of their politics.1
It’s funny to me (and by funny I mean sad) that the left/right axis of the political compass gets all the attention when the authoritarian/anarchist one matters far more. A few years ago, I said that anyone who supports authoritarian regimes, including Donald Trump’s, should not be an admin on Wikipedia, and almost everyone took this as a left/right statement, with some even asking how I’d feel if someone said the same about Biden supporters. But I have no loyalty to the corrupt and cronyist Democratic Party. Nor to liberalism or progressivism—I consider myself culturally conservative in the sense that I think preserving tradition is generally a good thing and that change in a community needs to be an organic decision from within. And I only have a qualified loyalty to an American left whose members squandered much of the past eight years more interested in cancelling one another for saying “stupid” than in going after actual fascists.2
No, it’s the other axis that matters. Arguably it’s the only one that matters, since if all views can be exchanged freely and equitably in a society, one can expect the left/right axis to accurately represent the consensus of the body politic.
That is what puts the three of us on a plane that with every hour takes us another 600 miles away from the land of the free and the home of the brave: Fascism. Or if you’re the type to be pedantic about that word, sparkling authoritarianism.
My relationship with my trans-ness is as complicated as my relationship with leftism. I have hormonally and socially transitioned from male to some fem-of-center space, and so by that definition I am trans. But I reject the idea that gender is something one identifies as; gender is a social construct, an emergent property of our interactions with others. As a result, I’m not willing to call myself a woman, or even to say I’m not a man, unless it’s using a definition someone else has provided. Instead, my trans-ness feels largely incidental to my life, just a simple fact about the medications I take and clothes I wear, not dissimilar from the fact that I wear glasses. As I’ve been travelling, both in this flight from fascism and in our goodbye trip to relatives before it, I’ve found masculine clothes easier to work with, and so for the first time since 2019 have been getting a smattering of “sir”s in with the “ma’am”s. It surprises me a bit when it happens, but it doesn’t upset me.
And so I might not seem the type to worry that much about how the Trump administration is treating trans people. The “M” on my passport does not cause me any gender dysphoria. If I’m being true to my philosophy of gender being based on others’ perceptions, I can’t even call it inaccurate, even if it might be inconvenient.
But reality is more complicated than that. The U.S. government did not reach a reasoned decision to only use anatomical sex at birth as its definition of gender or sex. It decided to arbitrarily enforce that strange definition specifically in the context of trans Americans leaving the country and trans foreigners entering. This both discourages trans people from getting passports, and complicates travel if they do get them.
I don’t know about you, but if someone tries to make it harder for me to leave a place, I start to get worried.
Combine that with efforts to deprive trans prisoners of HRT and place trans women in cells with men, restrictions on trans healthcare for minors that are creeping above the 18-year mark, and a smorgasbord of proposed laws that would criminalize various aspects of the trans experience, and it’s hard not to see a pattern, a conspiracy to render trans people helpless, criminalize us, and then abuse us. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a trans person’s genitals—forever.3
And this horror will not discriminate based on what kinds of trans we are.
I had been saying that a fascist takeover was in the offing since 2016. After January 6th, one friend called to apologize for not believing me. Before the 2024 election, my family stockpiled food and water, prepared for unrest if Trump contested a Harris victory. Instead, when he won, we decided to wait and see how competent he would be in his second term at implementing the fascist goals he largely failed at in his first.
Within days we were talking about leaving.
I was the holdout vote. It took me about three weeks. There were a few factors. One was a sense that, while things were not yet so dire as to justify fleeing, it would take weeks to months to get ready if we wanted to do it right, and we didn’t want to get caught in a logjam once the shit hit the fan. Another was a sense that as a Jew, I am descended from generations of people who made the right call to leave when they did, and that I could do as some ancestors did and go scout out a place that other relatives could move to in time. But the biggest influence was the impact on my soul if we stayed. I am a naturally very emotional person, and I’ve learned to cope with that by tamping down emotions when I feel threatened. I would wake up every morning, read the news about the latest fascistic overtures of the Trump administration, and feel less and less emotion. After a few weeks of having to pretend to have feelings, I was starting to crack. Could I do this for another three years and 49 weeks, minimum? No.
I did not want to leave America. I love my house and my town and the birds and dolphins and butterflies we see each year, and I do not want to be away from them. I have multiple sick relatives who may die in the next few years. I do not want to miss my last meaningful moments with them. And when it comes to the chaos this administration will unleash, I do not want to shy away from a fight. If someone could guarantee to me that there will be a fight worth fighting, there’s just enough toxic masculinity in me that I probably would’ve stayed and prepared for that.
But empirically, most descents into fascism are quiet. Most people are not so inconvenienced by the erosion of their liberties to risk their lives to stop it. And those who are number too few to make a difference. This is the cruel math that keeps fascist regimes in power.
This isn’t me saying that every trans person should leave just yet. In addition to the factors that pushed us to leave, we also were at a point in our lives where, purely by coincidence, all three of us had relatively few encumbrances, and we had the logistical and financial resources to make this happen.4
If you are in a group that Trump is targeting, and you happen to be in the same situation as us of both wanting to leave and being able to, you should. If you cannot, here is my advice of what you should be doing:
- Watch “Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun.” by @deviantollam.
- Being ready to leave:
- Get a passport if you don’t have one. If you are trans, that means that the passport will misgender you. That sucks. It does not mean you should not get it.
- Look into whether you are eligible for any second citizenships. If you have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who immigrated, there’s a decent chance you are; and if you don’t, you might still be. Some countries have very broad grants of citizenship even without proving a specific ancestor, for instance Benin to most people of African descent and Israel to most Jews and some gentile relatives of Jews.
- Come up with a plan of where you’d go if you had to. Immigration laws will limit where you can actually move to, but as a U.S. citizen you can stay for 60-90 days in most countries without a visa. Do you know literally anyone else in a foreign country who you could stay with? If so, unless you have considerable savings or their country is also a fascist nightmare, you should probably pick that at least as a starting point.
- If your plan is somewhere other than Canada or Mexico, try to save up at least $1,000. For some people this is obviously easier said than done, but that’s still my recommendation: From a major U.S. airport, $500 will get you almost anywhere in the world; another $500 for ancillary costs makes this the minimum viable budget.
- Look into jobs that can be done remotely. Digital nomad visas are one of the easier ways to get situated in foreign countries.
- While you’re still stateside:
- If it is safe and feasible for you to do so, buy a gun and learn how to use it. Operation Blazing Sword provides a list of LGBTQ-friendly firearm instructors. The Pink Pistols, Armed Equality, and the Socialist Rifle Association are all worth looking into too.
- Do everything you can to make it difficult for Trump and his allies to govern, at a federal, state, and local level.
- Democrats, even now, are pursuing any number of laws that expand the government’s power, seemingly indifferent as to how these could be exploited by fascists. Most troublingly, this includes gun control laws (many of which explicitly target marginalized groups) and “online safety” laws (many of which can be used to out trans people or punish queer people for interacting with minors). Oppose these, intensely but not obnoxiously. If someone who claims they are an ally of the LGBTQ community supports these kinds of laws, fucking call them out. Explain how the law will be used to hurt us. Explain that the bad guys already have their guns and that now is not the time to cut off queer kids’ lifelines.
It would be disingenuous to end this post on a happy note. If you are a trans person in America right now, the three ways things are going to get better are because you flee, because you fight and win, or because you keep your head down until this is all over. None of those are good futures. All I can recommend is my usual trick for processing horrible things happening in the world, which is adjusting your expectations. Most people in human history have lived somewhere where they weren’t free. Many had to make difficult choices about what they were willing to do to be more free.
The house I just left was rebuilt in the ’90s by an immigrant named Joe Pfeiffer, who had been jailed twice for trying to leave Hungary without a permit, before succeeding on his third try and coming to America, the land of freedom and opportunity. He told me about this when I was five, and it was the first time I had to consider the idea of not being free to make your own decisions, and of making what decisions you could, nonetheless. You always have a choice, even if it’s not the choice you want.
But now it strengthens me
To know the truth at last
That everything comes from consummation
And everything comes with consequence
And I did it all with exultation
While you did it all with hopelessness
Yes, I did it all with adoration
While you killed it off with all of your holy mess
What now?
-- Sufjan Stevens, "The Ascension"
Fediverse Reactions
- See also: Alexander, Scott (2014). “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup“. Slate Star Codex. ↩︎
- That is not to say I endorse a form of leftism totally devoid of identity-based considerations either. See: JREG (2023). “Leftist Critique of Social Justice“. ↩︎
- With apologies to: Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. pt. 3, ch. 2. See also: Unwoman (2012). “The Future, The Boot“. The Fires I Started. ↩︎
- I might make a post later about the logistics of our move, but only if I can find a way to make our experience generalizable. ↩︎