“You know, you can opt out of my crap. But you shouldn’t have to leave America because the president’s making the block too hot for you,” said Dave Chappelle in a recent NPR interview in reference to the Republican party doing their level best to make the United States as unwelcoming and unequal as possible for transgender Americans. “I’m team TERF,” also said Dave Chappelle, during his 2021 “comedy” special. You know something is wrong in the country when one of the most outspoken, most caustic transphobes in the world thinks the Republicans are overdoing it.

As a transsexual lesbian REALTOR® in Madison, I have another way of knowing. If there is one conversation trans folks have when we get together, is what our exit strategies are. As a REALTOR®, people who can go now are asking me to sell their homes.

Canaries in the Coal Mine

Trans people, trans women in particular, are American society’s canary in the coal mine.

Before I get to that, however, it might be appropriate to go over the state of the union for trans folks right now. The zone has been flooded for everyone in Trump’s second term, but it has been unusually bad for trans folks.

On his first day in office Mr. Trump issued orders designed to erase trans folks from American life, stipulating that there are only two genders, and that they correspond immutably to one’s sex assigned at conception (I know). The orders restrict our ability to safely travel, to safely pee in public restrooms, and to have accurate identification documents. He also cut funding for research or public aid that mentions gender in any way, causing disruptions in public sector funding larger than anyone could have anticipated. Medicare funding for any organization providing medically appropriate health care to trans youth was threatened. (UW dutifully complied in advance.) Trans members of the military have been expelled. This, of course, is ironically excused as “defending women,” fighting “gender ideology,” and “restoring biological truth”—whatever that means. It obviously isn’t based in reality.

Anti-trans Bills

There are now too many states in the country where many of those executive orders are backed by law. There were over 745 anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures in 2025.

The Supreme Court continues to play Calvinball (from the Calvin and Hobbes comicstrip) with civil rights. In the recent Skrmetti decision, the justices argued that trans health care can be curtailed by states as long as the laws restricting care are restricting specific procedures and not restricting health care from a specific class of people. Yet, I’m sure they’ll find a way to allow cis women to get breast augmentation on demand—Calvinball, like misogyny, has no rules. What makes this even worse is that it is the position of the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Endocrine society, the World health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (among MANY others) that transition and associated medical interventions and ongoing care is safe, effective, and medically appropriate.

We are currently enduring a moral panic about trans women having the audacity to play sports. The red herring is always a claim to want to protect women and girls. The fact is that trans women are no more likely to do anything in a ladies room than any cis woman is. The fact is that anti-trans laws invariably end up hurting cis women more.

I wish I could say this is all of it. In 2011, the National LGBT Task force issued a report on transgender discrimination. It was titled “Injustice at every turn.” Things are much worse now. But this isn’t an article about the indignities trans folks in America suffer in the current day. This is a about how some of us are responding.

Trans Families Leaving the Country

In May of 2025, I received an email from a couple, one of whom is trans, that said, essentially “Come sell our house.” This was a beautifully cared-for 1912 4-bedroom folk/farm home on a double lot that the owners had put countless hours into. I think they were more heartbroken to leave their extensive garden than they were their beautiful home. They had hoped to spend the next several decades here. When I asked them why they felt they had to leave they told me, “We were very concerned that access to trans-related care for our family was going to be eroded, the laws being passed in many states, corporate hospital systems capitulating to political pressure, Donald Trump’s statements during the election, and his executive orders after it. We knew the process could take over a year, so we could not wait until things got ‘really bad’ to make a move. And while we hoped (and continue to hope) that the U.S. does not fall further into repeating 1930s Germany, we knew that we needed to start making plans soon after the election.” 

These are not wealthy people, just fortunate to have dual citizenship, which made the move possible for them. “After Trump was elected the first time, we got the process going for getting dual citizenship for our kids,” they told me. “But it wasn’t something that we were seriously considering until maybe much later in life given the financial impact it would have on our family, and the loss of community.”

The winner of the Bad Timing Award has to go to the trans couple who bought a condo with me in October of 2024. In their defense, they were moving to Wisconsin from Iowa, fleeing that state’s oppressive civil rights legislation, which has only grown more immoral since then. They were some of the more than 400,000 other trans people who have moved to safer states since the president was elected. They planned to stay indefinitely in Wisconsin, near family and not too far from family in Iowa. Instead, in June of 2025, they reached out and said—as I was becoming accustomed to hearing—“Come sell our house.” 

When I showed up, I knew why they wanted to move. They knew I knew. They told me anyway. “We wanted to move to a country where we had civil rights and access to health care.” 

Fortunately for them, one of them is a nurse, and because of a shortage of nurses in Canada (just like here) they were able to use the express entry pathway, which made the process significantly easier, but by no means easy. I asked what the process was like. 

“It took 10 months to work through all the bureaucracy of immigration. It was expensive and labor intensive. I had to take an English test, provide proof I didn’t have a criminal record, proof of my education, license, and employment history. I had to get a British Columbia nursing license. I had to secure a job in British Columbia. We all had to do special medical exams, official fingerprinting, and we had to show we had substantial savings. We had just moved and bought our condo. We didn’t have substantial savings. So we cashed out our retirement accounts. And those were not the only big sacrifices we made. We sold the condo that we’d lived in less than 1.5 years. We lost proximity to our family and friends. We lost our whole support system and moved someplace where we didn’t know a soul.”

As one of those left behind, I wondered if the move had been worth it. “Now we live in a place where we are safe and welcome. We live by the sea. And we have every reason to believe we can take care of ourselves and be safe. In British Columbia we have civil rights, abortion rights, and universal health care. School shootings are an anomaly here. There’s real parental leave after having a baby. There is subsidized daycare. We are making new friends. We feel a deep and profound sense of relief and safety being permanent residents of Canada. We are very grateful to Canada for having us. In addition to being trans, we are an educated professional couple with no criminal history. We are good parents raising a great kid. We are good friends and neighbors. Iowa and the United States are missing out on us.”

Coincidentally, if you are a healthcare professional considering leaving the United States, “Canada’s Healthcare Infusions” are a group of ordinary folks prepared to help you make the task more manageable: engageq.notion.site/infusionhosts.

Hunkering Down

Not every trans person is moving away. Some folks are moving here. As I alluded to above, lots of trans folks are moving from states like Texas, Florida, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Idaho where they have fewer rights and even less physical safety, to better states like Wisconsin. Or at least to Madison, despite our well-documented TERF problem.

I recently sold a home (a 4-bedroom diamond in the rough on the bike path) to a trans woman who is planning to stay in the U.S. and, in her words, “hunker down” instead of leave. It isn’t that she isn’t aware of the same issues that others are, but she has a different perspective. She grew up in a conservative state, and not too many years ago graduated from a college in Florida. She told me, “Madison feels like a really special hidden gem and an exception to a lot of the chaos.” 

I would agree. Madison is famous for being 70-square-miles of sanity, after all. There is another issue that also informs this particular woman’s choice, and that is her confidence that her employer, a well-known medical technology firm, is able and willing to provide her with a transfer to an international location if that should become more important. That is a level of security few of us are able to match.

This is in contrast to a trans woman I have sold two homes to, who grew up in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States as an adult. She told me that while she is tired of having to merely survive in the United States, she also feels unsafe traveling, stating that if she has to leave the country, she expects that it will be a one-way trip. She told me she believes that because of her age, employability, and savings, “It has to get bad enough that I would be willing to explore refugee status.”

There is also a friend of mine from graduate school who has dual citizenship with Australia. She is a trans woman, an unabashed member of the clergy, and like the folks who sold their condo, a recent transplant from Iowa after that state removed gender identity protections from the Iowa Civil Rights Act—protections that had been a part of Iowa law since 2007. She told me that after the election, she made sure that her Australian citizenship documents were current “just in case.” I asked her about life in Iowa, where she still has family, and why she felt she had to leave. 

“Iowa used to be a good place. It no longer is,” she said. “The number of anti-LGBTQIA laws and restrictions that have been enacted in recent years have made life there very difficult. Just trying to use a public restroom has become a legally risky act.”

The block is indeed too hot, due in no small part to folks like Dave Chappelle, J. K. Rowling, and Caitlin Jenner. People are having to leave the country. Those who haven’t left have contingency plans. Many of our legal protections have been lost. We are far too often at the mercy of the kindness of strangers during a time of unprecedented, unimaginable, and ignorant cruelty when such mercy is almost guaranteed not to exist. Certainly not for us. 

The canary is gasping for breath.