Isabella remembers the moment she knew she needed to leave the U.S. It was March 2023, when Daily Wire host Michael Knowles gave a chilling speech to one of the most influential conservative gatherings in the country.
“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing,” Knowles told the Conservative Political Action Conference. “For the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen victim to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely: the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
To Isabella, who is trans, this declaration was a clear sign of the Republican Party’s increasing embrace of hardcore anti-trans politics — and a potential harbinger of “genocidal action.” This spring, after years of preparation, she moved to Chile.
She is not alone. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in US v Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee and other red states’ rights to ban transition healthcare for minors, four trans people told The Independent that the case had solidified their plans to escape the USA.
Like every single person interviewed for this story, Isabella would only speak under a pseudonym out for fear of reprisals from far-right extremist groups, or perhaps even government officials.
And while the Skrmetti decision only concerned trans children, those who spoke to The Independent feared that the Court’s reasoning could make it easier to restrict trans healthcare for adults too — as Republicans are already trying to do nationally.
“Before the 2024 election, my timeline for relocating abroad was more like five to ten years out, if at all. Before today, I was considering sometime within the next year or two. But now, I am thinking of moving by the end of the summer,” said Wayne, a trans man in his late forties in Washington state, on the day the Skrmetti ruling came down.
Though he also has personal reasons to leave the country, he said the Skrmetti ruling was “another falling domino.”
“I don’t want to leave my country, but things have been on a downward trajectory for trans rights for the past several years,” he said. “We have transitioned from a system of democracy into an electoral autocracy… no one is coming to save us.”
‘I won’t accept second class status’
In the past few years, 25 U.S. states have passed laws restricting banning transition healthcare for minors, according to the pro-LGBT+ Movement Advancement Project — covering an estimated 37 percent of all trans under-18s.
Some states have also enacted restrictions on adult care, and Republicans in Congress have made repeated attempts to defund or limit access at the federal level.
Meanwhile, conservative rhetoric about trans people has become ever more venomous. Knowles likened them to “demons.” One Republican candidate claimed pro-trans teachers should be “executed.” Multiple serving GOP legislators have falsely claimed that random mass shooting suspects are trans, while Donald Trump Jr has alleged — contrary to all available evidence — that trans people are “the most violent domestic terror threat” in the country.
Then came Donald Trump’s second inauguration, and his blitzkrieg effort to centralize federal power under the office of the president. Since then migration has become a regular topic among trans people both online and in person, along with acidic social media debates about the ethics and class politics of fleeing one’s country.
“My plans for emigration have been in a holding pattern,” said one trans lawyer in her forties, who began transitioning roughly 25 years ago and is now considering leaving the country.
“Getting all the documents and background checks and apostilles to be able to move, and contacting contractors… but not making any decisions yet in the increasingly vain hope that abandoning my family and home country won’t become a necessity,” she said.
“This [Skrmetti] decision definitely made me get back into planning mode. I had begun to build up some steely resolve about fighting for my country… but days like this really suck out all the air.
“When you find yourself crying at random songs, no matter how limited their emotional appeal would be in any other situation, it’s hard not to look at your hands and then up and the sky and say ‘where do I go now?’
“I won’t accept being a pariah, or being denied hormones despite being post-[surgery]. I won’t accept second or third class status.”
The lawyer also argues that the SCOTUS ruling may be widened, since there is “nothing in the decision that indicates it will remain confined to pediatric care questions.”
Stacy Davis, a 42-year-old Nashville realtor who has a trans child, told The Independent that her family will stay in Tennessee as long as they possibly can, even if it means traveling regularly for medical care at great expense.
But if they are forced to move, it would probably be abroad. “I think it would have been easier to move from Tennessee to a blue state if [Kamala Harris] would have won, because at least then we would have had some reassurances that on a federal level we would be more protected,” she said. But now, “it almost feels like a blue state can’t save us.”
Multiple groups have sprung up to help trans people migrate, either within the U.S. or internationally. Some are open and legally incorporated, such as the Denver-based non-profit Trans Continental Pipeline. “At the heart of it, we’re glorified movers, trying to help people get where they want to go and out of traumatic situations,” founder Keira Richards told Mother Jones last year.
Other groups are more secretive and ad-hoc, fearful of attacks and harassment by anti-trans extremists.
“We’ve had a few people today contact us and/or announce their desire to emigrate faster from the USA, considering the broader implications of this ruling,” a member of one such group told The Independent.
“People of course are stockpiling hormones and getting passports in order if they can… I can tell you our top destinations are Canada, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Thailand, and the Netherlands in particular.”
The group includes trans people in countries across the world, this person said, including some lawyers who help people understand the implications of new U.S. anti-trans policies. In some places, they have contacts who can help trans immigrants get settled in and find community.
Group members gather and share information on immigration pathways, visa requirements, and the level of freedom and protection available to trans people in various countries.
‘We’ve read our history books. We know where this goes’
The story of one trans woman we’ll call Rachel illustrates how individual areas and then the entire USA have become progressively more hostile to trans people. Back in 2023, having already moved from the Tennessee countryside where she grew up to the big city of Nashville, she felt forced to flee her home state entirely.
“At that time I was highly skeptical that it would ever get to the point where I had to emigrate,” Rachel told The Independent. “I have to say that I completely stand corrected.”
Initially, Nashville had felt safe enough for her to finally transition. But beginning in around 2020, when conservative news site The Daily Wire moved its headquarters to Nashville, she felt a major “tonal shift.”
Relatives who’d once been supportive began to turn against her. Nazi flyers were stuffed into her mailbox. She received “direct threats” from people she believes were probably her neighbors, and suffered repeated housing discrimination despite having a steady income. Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, a prominent anti-trans activist, held a “rally to end child mutilation” at the state capitol.
In March 2023, on the same day Tennessee’s Republican governor Bill Lee signed the healthcare ban at the heart of the Skrmetti case, someone draped a huge swastika-emblazoned banner from a Nashville bridge thanking him for “tirelessly working to fight trannies and fags.” At another point, Rachel recalls, someone projected the words “TRANS-FREE TENNESSEE” on a local building.
Rachel even had a brush with Skrmetti himself: that is, Tennessee’s attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, against whom the Supreme Court lawsuit was filed. In 2022 he demanded detailed patient records from Rachel’s trans healthcare provider Vanderbilt University, leading to accusations that he was trying to compile a “list” of trans people.
“Skrmetti seems like the ghost that will hound me for the rest of my life,” complained Rachel. “It’s always Tennessee! It’s a state out of which the current manifestation of conservative politics has grown. And I was there to witness it.”
Now those politics have taken root in the White House, and Rachel is applying for citizenship in the foreign country where one of her parents was born — something she’s always been eligible for, but only recently started seriously working on.
For her, the new Supreme Court decision changed nothing. But listening to the oral arguments before Trump’s inauguration, and anticipating which way the case would go, was part of what made her plan to leave in the first place.
Even though she isn’t totally sure whether she’ll go, Rachel wants to be ready at short notice. She keeps many of her belongings in storage, and has abandoned some of her hobbies for fear that the equipment would weigh her down.
“I think that everything is on the table at this point,” she said. “The same rhetorical patterns, in some cases precisely the same accusations, that are being levied at trans people were being levied at the Jewish population [in Nazi Germany].
“We’ve read our history books. We know the outcome of that is… I think it’s naive to think that it’s impossible in the United States.”
(Knowles, for his part, has insisted that his 2023 CPAC speech was not a call for cultural genocide against trans people because they are not a group with shared genetics, and also because they are “not a legitimate category of being.”)
To Isabella, living in Chile has been both a challenge and a relief. She’s still figuring out her medical care, still learning Spanish, still trying to meet new friends. “Winter and summer are flipped, which is so weird to me,” she said.
Not everyone could have made the move, she notes. She was lucky enough to have some local contacts and a job that she could keep doing from her new country, as well as the financial resources necessary to uproot her life.
But she no longer has to deal with the daily drumbeat of assaults on her rights and unashamed demonization of her identity. “You feel like you can breathe better, and you’re not worried that you’re gonna be the victim of some terrible attack,” she said.
Even so, she can’t completely stop worrying. Conservative politicians across the world have found trans people a tempting punchbag, including in nearby Argentina. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler has argued that transphobia is a central element of modern fascism, from to Hungary to Brazil to the USA and beyond.
“You never know, these days, because transphobia is global,” said Isabella. “The question is, is it going to come to Chile? That’s always a fear. So I’m always keeping my eyes open.”
