People protest against SB 480, a total ban on affirming care for transgender youth,
In the aftermath of a national election in which Republicans spent $215 million on a coordinated effort to demonize the trans community, trans Americans in deep red states are fleeing for their lives.
And they’re turning to TikTok and Instagram for help.
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“I can’t live here as long as that’s a danger for me,” Texas native Iris says in a video posted to TikTok. “I feel like my life has just started and I can’t let it end before I get to do anything.”
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Iris reached out for assistance with moving costs — she’s thinking about relocating to California, with its strong protections for LGBTQ+ people. The ask wasn’t easy, she told Wired magazine.
“Making that TikTok was really hard, because I’ve never been a person who likes asking for help or needing help, really,” Iris said. ”Especially in a system that values this imaginary idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, doing everything for yourself, and this individualism — it makes it really hard to be vulnerable and ask for help because it feels like a failure.”
In states like Texas, finding healthcare for trans people is increasingly difficult, and it’s banned for trans minors. Trans Texans can’t change the gender markers on their birth certificates and state IDs. With more legislation in the pipeline restricting or abolishing trans rights, Iris said she had no choice but to leave home.
“I just didn’t know what else to do,” she added.
Her humbling TikTok video paid off: Iris raised $34,000 for her move, more than triple her goal of $10,000.
While Iris reached out for help on her own, both TikTok and Instagram have also become resources for finding assistance through groups built for that purpose, providing a level of security online for trans people.
Like Iris, most people “just don’t have the ability to move across the country,” said Keira Richards, executive director of Denver-based nonprofit Trans Continental Pipeline (TCP). The group helps trans people relocate to Colorado by offering financial assistance, transportation, resources for local housing, and community assistance, in a state with strong LGBTQ+ rights and trans health care protections.
Richards told Wired applications have skyrocketed, with a majority of requests coming from Texas and Florida, ballooning from 20 applications in October to over 400 by mid-November.
Mutual aid funds like transanta, started in 2020, post letters and stories from trans people in need, whom users can directly and anonymously donate to. Genderbands offers yearly grants for transition care-related costs, including procedures, travel costs, and paperwork, and non-profit Rainbow Railroad helps LGBTQ+ people around the world flee persecution.
TCP’s Richards says her group is compiling resources outside of Colorado that are accessible on social.
“We’re talking to other groups in Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Washington, the other safe states who are trying to compile similar resource lists like we do,” she says. “We’re trying to support other groups trying to do the same so we can meet this demand.”
“What’s kept me strong through it all is the belief that I will eventually get to a point of being able to transition,” said Texas refugee Iris. “The realization that all of that could be taken away from me, despite how long I’ve waited and how much I’ve been trying to prepare for that — I knew that if I had to sit in that feeling for four years, I would not survive.”
“The biggest act of resistance that trans people can do in this country,” she said, “is to refuse to die and refuse to let ourselves be pushed into the darkness.”
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