Last month, I was featured in an NPR article exploring America’s growing phenomenon of “ideological sorting.” “In a country that’s growing ever-more polarized, the shifting demographics cut in both directions—and it is happening across the country,” they wrote. “In one study from 2022, researchers concluded that ‘at no point since the Civil War have partisans been as clustered within individual states as today.’”
I told NPR that I was living in Odessa, Texas, in December 2022 when I started hormone replacement therapy (HRT). I had spent the previous two years exploring aspects of my gender expression and gender identity behind closed doors, and it ultimately brought me to that first dose of estrogen; but it wasn’t until I started living my authentic life in public that the constant risks to my safety became fully apparent to me. Threats of violence and worse became a daily part of my life. Just a few months later, seeing the onslaught of anti-transgender bills introduced in the Texas Legislature that threatened to criminalize my existence and take away my doctor-prescribed health care, I knew it was time to leave. I moved to Seattle shortly after, and I told the reporter at NPR that I describe myself as a trans refugee.
My story is told alongside that of Kirby and Trina Wilbur, who moved from Seattle to Texas because they felt politically out of place in Washington. Kirby was raised in Seattle. He’s a former conservative talk show host and three-time Republican delegate, who met his wife while working on the Reagan campaign. He and his wife “fled” Seattle after the 2020 George Floyd protests. They used a service called Conservative Move to relocate to McKinney, Texas, where the taxes were lower, the homes were cheaper, and their neighbors shared their conservative politics.
Related: Seattle Is Not ‘Overwhelmed’ by Trans People
Like me, he also called himself a “refugee.” But choosing to relocate because you prefer a different political culture, lower taxes, or a more affordable housing market is fundamentally different from leaving because your very existence is targeted by the government.
NPR’s article places transgender people fleeing government-sanctioned discrimination into the same category as people relocating for personal preference. While Americans may often relocate in search of better opportunities or communities that reflect their values and lifestyles, treating these experiences as equivalent only serves to flatten two profoundly different realities.
More importantly, that framing benefits a political narrative that seeks to minimize the impact of anti-transgender laws. It encourages dismissing the growing crisis of internally displaced transgender people as little more than a personal choice rather than the consequence of government policy.
In my role as co-chair of the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, I’ve spoken with countless transgender people who have uprooted their lives because remaining where they lived had become untenable. Many outside our community struggle to appreciate the cumulative effect of policies that target nearly every aspect of daily life: healthcare, identity documents, employment, housing, education, public accommodations, and even the ability to safely exist in public.
Recently in Kansas, a transgender woman was charged for driving without a valid license after presenting identification bearing an “M” marker at a traffic stop, which state law had required her to obtain just earlier this year. The case was ultimately dismissed, but the lesson for transgender people is clear: complying with the law still exposed her to arrest because the state had created a situation in which her appearance and her legally mandated identification no longer aligned.
Over the past several years, dozens of jurisdictions have enacted laws depriving transgender people of civil rights protections and targeting our ability to exist safely in public. No single law tells the whole story, but together they create conditions in which everyday life becomes increasingly precarious.
That is why we need to discuss the issue of internally displaced trans refugees.
Given the White House’s recent press release on the “push to eliminate transgender insanity,” the term here is not a rhetorical exaggeration. It reflects the reality that people are leaving their homes, families, careers, and communities because remaining there has become incompatible with living safely and with dignity. These moves often involve financial hardship, housing instability, interrupted careers, and profound grief. People are not sleeping in their cars in Seattle because they thought it would be a fun adventure, and they’re certainly not doing it for “free surgeries.” They are coming to Seattle because staying in Tennessee, Idaho, Texas, or Florida has become even more dangerous than not having a roof over their head.
In the same way, I didn’t leave Texas because Seattle aligns more closely with my political beliefs. I left because the trajectory of state policies made it increasingly difficult to imagine building a stable future there. My move wasn’t about finding a place where everyone agrees with me. It was about finding a home where I could reasonably expect to exist without being deprived of basic human rights by my state government.
Reducing stories like mine to ideological sorting obscures the role that federal, state, and local government policies play in forcing people from their homes. It also risks diminishing a humanitarian crisis that cities like Seattle are already confronting as transgender people seek safety across state lines in greater numbers. Not all migration reflects preference. Sometimes it reflects necessity.
If we want to understand what is happening right now, we need to treat seriously the difference between people seeking a community that better matches their values and people searching for the basic conditions necessary to live with safety and dignity.
One is ideological sorting.
The other is survival.
Jessa Davis (she/her) is the Executive Director of OPEN, the founder of Flourish Pacific Northwest, LLC, a Co-Chair of the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, Board Secretary of Queer Power Alliance, and Board Secretary of Whole Washington. She transitioned at the age of 37 while living in Odessa, Texas, and she has found her forever home in Seattle.
