Escaping from the US to Europe. A Transgender Man's Story.
James S tells the story about his journey from Alaska to California and then to the Netherlands in search of a safe place to live. He reflects on the way transphobia and anti-trans policies affect transgender Americans.
In Summer of 2024, I decided to move back to the Bay Area. Before that, I’d been living in my hometown of Kodiak for the previous two years, living pretty comfortably in my first one bedroom apartment.
I worked as a special ed aide at the same school I had attended for kindergarten and first grade, and I had a pretty decent support network considering the remoteness of a little town on an island in Alaska.
There had of course been some struggles, because I’m a trans man and for quite a few years now trans people and our lives have been a hot button issue to say the least.
Kodiak religious transphobia
I had been on a committee of educators and medical professionals to review and help update the school district’s health curriculum since 2022, because the whole process had been started, stopped, and slowed as community members and some committee members complained about anything that so much as resembled an acknowledgement of trans people’s existence in the presence of children (an incredibly surreal and painful thing to witness over and over again as a trans person who made my living helping my community raise and care for their children).
Early on, a petition from a local new apostolic reformation church to stop the ‘indoctrination’ of children was passed around in many local venues over the health curriculum committee meetings, which along with direct complaints to the superintendent, caused the review process to be shelved for almost a year.
An ‘incident report’ was even posted on the Parents Defending Education’s IndoctriNation Map (in the tradition of maps targeting abortion providers, often for terroristic threats) over the committee's first meeting, where I brought up the importance of gender neutral, medically accurate language when discussing anatomy.
After the process of making decisions and then attending every school board meeting to hear and provide my own public comment, I began to feel anxious.
I watched the church’s services out of morbid curiosity and observed the pastor’s sermons grow increasingly hateful and arguably quite violent. He repeated at every opportunity that trans people were not real and alarmingly, aggressively (but very much in line with the new apostolic reformation) pushing the idea of ‘taking Kodiak for Jesus’.
Moving to San Francisco, but is California safe?
All of this, along with what I saw when I read the Project 2025 Mandate For Leadership led me to decide that maybe I should move somewhere more welcoming for a trans person.
I found an elementary special education aide position in San Francisco and a room to rent in Emeryville and was on my way.
In the back of my mind I held on to the understanding that this might not last. I remember having arguments with friends who insisted that California would be just fine despite the very clear intention laid out by Project 2025 to overhaul everything on a federal level.
Part of me had believed that California would somehow be safe as well though, which was the whole reason I’d moved. I knew that given everything that was probably untrue. But I felt desperate.
Trump & Co wants to ban "transgender ideology"
In the Mandate For Leadership document (which is now being put into action largely by way of executive orders), says “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” (read: media or information about trans people, likely including trans influencers and people publicly talking about their experiences) “has no claim to First Amendment protection” and claims that “it’s purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women”.
This idea of misogyny and harm to women especially is heavily reflected in the title and text of the first executive order to be signed by Donald Trump during this term.
The conflation of transgender people with pornography and child exploitation is alarming, because it would mean that anyone who talks about trans people around children could be classified as a sex offender.
I personally worry that this could extend to simply existing as an openly trans person around children, which is the biggest reason I decided to leave. I fear that this will be part of another executive order eventually, and that having just done my job would make me a criminal.
When Kamala Harris ran for president, I let myself feel a little bit hopeful that maybe I would be okay and able to settle down safely and permanently in California. I got comfortable for that small window of time, and then it was election day.
I went to a friend’s apartment and we watched some shows together to keep our attention off of the results, but of course we gave in and occasionally checked our phones, nervously watching the numbers move in a very foreboding direction. I told myself that the full count would probably be done in a matter of days rather than overnight, and did my best to relax and enjoy myself.
Things didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. Now it was time to decide what to do.
My initial plan was to try to go to Norway and go to college and maybe get a foothold there, because I’d heard long ago that Norwegian colleges didn’t charge tuition for foreign students. They do now, and there was no way that I was going to be able to raise tens of thousands of dollars by January.
I discussed with coworkers what to do and where to go, because I was not the only trans person working at the school who wanted to get out of the country.
Eventually, a friend sent me a tumblr post about the Dutch American Friendship Treaty visa. It ended up being pretty inaccurate and I really wonder whether the person who wrote it actually got that visa, but it led me to look further into it and find factual information.
I already had been taking art commissions for both commercial and private clients since I’d graduated high school, so all I had to do now was save money and get ready to really commit to what had once been a side hustle.
I started crowdfunding to raise money for my required business deposit of 4,500€, and before I knew it it was January 18th and I was on my first ever flight off of the continent.
In the days leading up to my departure I had started to seriously doubt my decision, had stayed up for days at a time panicking and shaking, said very tearful goodbyes to friends, and even considered canceling everything, refunding all of the money and staying put.
That sense of having made the wrong decision turned abruptly on its heel the day after my arrival when Trump signed an executive order titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”.
This order aimed to enshrine in federal law the idea that there are only two genders (assigned, according to the order, ‘at conception’ which if you know anything about fetal development is nonsense on its face), make it impossible to get an X as a gender marker on passports and other documents, and that such documents could only use an M or F marker reflecting what a person was assigned at birth.
I became very anxious about the status of my own passport, which says Male. I legally changed my name and gender markers all the way back in 2013. If I was sent home would I be detained? How much harder would it be now for other trans people to leave the US? Would my passport be taken away? Everything was now terrifying and uncertain.
Since then I have learned that, supposedly, I would only have an issue if I tried to renew my passport. Unfortunately I will have to renew mine during this administration, and I really don’t know what will happen. In all likelihood, I will have to have an F on it until I can get Dutch citizenship and a new passport.
I have heard of at least one trans person being denied a new passport at all, although negative attention and a lawyer were enough to move her passport office to give her one. It seems like the processes of renewing and getting new identification documents as a trans person is now very up in the air and ambiguous.
Living in the Netherlands
Now that I am in the Netherlands, I’ve made many friends who are also here on the DAFT visa as well as folks who were born and raised here.
It is a very small, accessible country with wonderful public transportation and it would be very easy to create a support network of trans and queer people looking for safety.
Right now the main obstacles are money and the requirement that you have your own business, as well as an inability to receive any government assistance on the DAFT visa, which have kept my closest friends from being able to escape with me.
I hope that soon they will have a clear road to safety and the ability to imagine a happy, secure future that they deserve, and that the current president is violently ripping away from them.
This is our first follow up article to "Let us make Europe a safe haven for American transgender refugees."
Illustration photo of passport: goodmoments
