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No One’s Coming: Why I Left the United States as a White Trans and Queer Person
Updated: Oct 6
It is a hard truth to accept when your house is burning:
No one is coming to save you.
Sometimes, you have to save yourself.
It was early summer 2024. My partner and I were sitting in our living room in our apartment near Portland, Oregon, about to have a conversation I had been anticipating for months.
We needed a plan.
Not a vague, someday-we-might-leave plan. A list. Specific things we could watch for that would tell us it was time to leave the United States.
My partner and I are both queer, medically transitioning nonbinary people. We are invisibly disabled. I am a therapist and coach. I spend a lot of my life noticing patterns: the little things that repeat until suddenly they aren't little anymore.
I had been reading The Rise and Fall of Roe v. Wade. I had read Project 2025. I had gotten myself onto The Heritage Foundation's mailing list and attended their webinars as a rogue agent, trying to understand what they were actually planning.
I did not want to be the person who left too late.
“I know trump is going to win this November,” I said. “We need to have the talk.”
“We don't know that yet,” my partner said. “What if Kamala Harris runs? There is hope.”
I remember sitting there and realizing just how different our nervous systems were approaching the same information.
“I used to have hope,” I told them. “But after everything I've learned, and all the patterns I've picked up on both a micro and macro level, I don't have hope left.”
I was scared.
I was also angry.
I talked about how exhausted and distracted so many people seemed. How much money and organization the conservative movement had. How long these plans had been in development. How prepared they seemed to be to actually use political power.
My partner of ten years looked at me.
“If there's one thing I trust in the world, it's your pattern recognition skills,” they said. “It's what makes you a good therapist, coach, and friend.”
They paused.
“Okay. What are the signals that we have to go?”
So we made the list.
We sat together in our living room, quietly writing down our contingencies while grieving a life we hadn't even left yet.
trump wins the presidential election.
The first stages outlined in Project 2025 begin moving into action within the first few months.
Unbadged people with guns or assault weapons start taking people off the street.
Military-like personnel are sent into major cities.
Military personnel are sent to Portland.
There is serious discussion of trans people being labeled an extremist or terrorist group.
There is talk of a trans registry.
And then we added something that, looking back, may have been one of the most important questions on the list:
How are people reacting?
Are people outraged?
Are people organizing?
Are people refusing to accept what is happening?
Is there mass resistance that is actually changing things?
And then:
What are the people closest to us doing?
That one hurt more.
Our families had been supportive of us in many ways. We had been out for years. We had communicated our fears. We had talked about the possibility that we might eventually need to leave.
One family member had even told us she was putting money aside for several years so that we would have something to fall back on if we ever needed it.
I asked her about it one summer evening in 2024 while we sat together in a candlelit restaurant, eating something delicious.
“If trump gets elected,” I asked, “could we use that money to leave?”
“Yes,” she said assuredly.
“That money is yours to do with what you find best.”
I remember the relief.
I wanted to cry.
I felt cared for.
We had a safety net.
A privileged-as-fuck safety net, to be very clear.
We went into the election knowing that, if we needed to leave, we believed our family would help us.
trump won in November 2024.
I wanted to leave immediately.
My partner was more hesitant. They still had hope. They saw the best in people. Honestly, it is one of the things I love most about them, even when their hope and my pattern recognition are in direct conflict.
So we waited.
And we asked about the money.
The answer was different than we expected.
“I'm sorry I gave you that impression. I don't have the money.”
We asked what happened to it.
“It's my money. I don't have to give you anything.”
There are sentences that don't seem particularly dramatic until they lodge themselves inside your
brain and refuse to leave.
That one stayed.
It's MY money.
By summer 2025, a year after that first conversation, many of the contingencies we had written down had been met, or were moving rapidly enough that we no longer felt comfortable waiting to see what happened next.
It was time to leave.
And the people we had hoped might help us were, in many ways, absent.
They had their own lives. Their own vacations. Their own homes. Their own things to worry about.
And I understand that.
I really do.
But there was something painful about watching people spend enormous amounts of energy on things that felt completely irrelevant to our immediate safety while we were trying to figure out how to get out.
We couldn't even consistently get our correct names and pronouns respected after eight years.
And I kept thinking:
If the people closest to us cannot prioritize something as small and personal as our names and pronouns, how can we expect them to mobilize around something as enormous as protecting marginalized people?
How can we expect someone to fight for the safety of people they don't know when they aren't willing to inconvenience themselves for the people sitting across the dinner table?
Maybe that sounds harsh.
Maybe it is.
But I needed to stop waiting for someone else to decide that our safety mattered.
That was the hardest part.
Because I did not want to leave the fight.
I wanted to stay.
I wanted to advocate.
I had spent years involved in political activism. I had a planned trip to the West Bank in September of 2025 for direct activism in Palestine before physical limitations related to my disability made the trip impossible.
The fight was still in me.
I just wasn't sure I could keep fighting while drowning.
I was struggling with my own mental limitations. I was dealing with medical bills. My capacity was shrinking.
And underneath all of that was a question that felt almost impossible to answer:
Shouldn't I stay?
I am queer.
I am trans.
I am disabled.
But I am also white.
And being white has protected me in ways that being trans has not erased.
I have systemic privileges that I did not earn.
I have economic privilege that many people do not have.
And, crucially, I had something else:
I had the option to leave.
That matters.
A lot.
Leaving does not make me braver than the people who stay.
Staying does not make someone more committed to their community.
And leaving does not mean I have abandoned the people who cannot leave.
People are doing the best they can with the resources, responsibilities, bodies, families, finances,
immigration statuses, disabilities, relationships, and communities they have.
Some people stay because they want to fight where they are.
Some people leave because staying is no longer survivable.
Some people desperately want to leave and cannot.
Some people don't have the money.
Some don't have the passport.
Some don't have a safe place to go.
Some are responsible for children, parents, partners, or communities who cannot come with them.
Some people are simply exhausted.
There is no moral purity here.
There is just capacity.
There is just choice.
And there is privilege.
I was fortunate enough to have the privilege of making a choice.
So I chose to leave before I was forced to.
I chose to believe the patterns I was seeing.
I chose to build a life somewhere else.
I chose to grieve what I was leaving behind and still go.
That does not mean I stopped caring.
I can fight from afar.
I can advocate from afar.
I can use my voice, my work, my money, my relationships, my skills, and my capacity in ways that are actually sustainable for me.
And maybe that is part of what I have been learning through all of this:
You do not have to destroy yourself to prove that you care.
You are allowed to build a life where you can breathe.
You are allowed to want safety.
You are allowed to leave.
You are allowed to stay.
You are allowed to change your mind.
You are allowed to be scared.
You are allowed to be tired.
You are allowed to do what you can.
And if you are a person of color reading this, I want to be especially clear about something.
I am not going to pretend that leaving the United States means leaving racism behind.
Racism is global.
White supremacy is global.
There is no magical border where all of that disappears.
I do not know what leaving will mean for you. I cannot pretend that my experience of migration is the same as yours.
But I do want you to know this:
You deserve a life where you can breathe, too.
You deserve support.
You deserve community.
You deserve to be seen as a whole person rather than a political problem.
And if leaving is something you want and are able to do, I hope you know that it is possible to make it out.
Not everyone gets to leave.
I know that.
That is exactly why I don't take my ability to do it lightly.
I left because I had the privilege and the resources to choose another path.
And I am trying to use those privileges well.
This is part of why I became a therapist and coach for queer, trans, neurodivergent, and burned-out people in the first place.
Because I know what it feels like to be told, directly and indirectly, to keep going when your body is telling you something is wrong.
I know what it feels like to wonder whether you're allowed to want something different.
I know what it feels like to be in transition and not know whether you're making the right choice.
Sometimes healing looks like staying.
Sometimes it looks like leaving.
Sometimes it looks like building enough support that you finally have a choice.
And sometimes, when your house is burning, the most courageous thing you can do is stop waiting for someone else to come save you.
You grab what you can.
You take the people you love.
You step outside.
And then, once you can breathe again, you figure out what comes next.
I'm still figuring that part out.
But I'm here.
I'm breathing.
I'm building something new.
I'm rising into another life.
Thinking About Leaving the United States?
Leaving is one decision. Figuring out how to build a life somewhere new is another.
I created the Thriving Abroad Workbook to support you through the emotional side of moving abroad, before, during, and after the move.
Across 10 stages, you'll explore grief, identity shifts, culture shock, belonging, and what it means to slowly make somewhere new feel like home.
It includes reflection prompts, self-assessments, guided exercises, and practical challenges to help you move through the transition with more intention and a little less what the hell am I doing?
Not sure you're ready? Take the FREE Thriving Abroad Quiz.
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