The American Transgender Refugee Crisis

In the seven months after the 2024 election, 9% of transgender adults reported moving to a different state—against 5% of LGBTQ people overall, and 2% of Americans generally, per the Movement Advancement Project (MAP). Even using a conservative estimate of the number of trans people in the United States, the Williams Institute's roughly 2.1 million trans adults, which is well below other figures often cited, that represents upwards of 140,000 Americans (though this doesn’t fully account for trans people who might have moved regardless of legal conditions) who moved to flee hostile state and local governments. In seven months.

This did not begin with the election of Trump. The largest survey of trans Americans ever conducted found in 2022 that 5% had already left their state because of anti-trans laws—a cumulative figure, gathered across years. MAP's researchers note their own finding is "considerably higher than in other recent surveys." Five percent, accumulated over years. Then nine percent, in seven months. That survey closed on June 13, 2025, and nobody has counted since.

Annualized, what we are seeing is a displacement rate of roughly 15% a year. And because trans people are largely not fleeing blue states (which means that the pool of leavers would actually be the 47% of trans adults who live in the 29 states with at least one restrictive law), the rate among trans people in the states doing the persecuting is closer to 29%. Nearly a third, in a year. 

If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing.

We do not talk about this as the crisis that this is—at least, not enough. In one sense that is understandable. When we talk about the chaos and pain this administration has wrought, we talk about the criminal depredations of ICE and the mass deportation agenda. We talk about the dismantling of USAID, which Lancet researchers project could cost 14 million lives by 2030, more than 4 million of them children under five. We talk about the disastrous Iranian war. We talk about the ongoing criminality of the administration. There is so much wrong, so much damage being done daily, that Americans moving across state lines brooks little comment.

But the sheer scale of this movement is breathtaking. Hundreds of thousands of trans people have had to flee persecution within the borders of the United States—persecution in the form of legal invalidation, such as Texas's SB 8, which effectively criminalizes the provision of inclusive bathroom access by institutions. But beyond the already repressive intent, the reporting apparatus set up to enforce this law is striking. It punishes institutions $25,000 for a first violation and $125,000 thereafter, lets individuals sue those institutions, and routes citizen complaints through an attorney general's tip line. Or Kansas's SB 244, which declared 1,700 driver’s licenses invalid overnight, reaching even trans residents who had never changed a gender marker. There has been persecution in the form of increased social scrutiny, harassment and violence. And there has been persecution in the undercutting of access to vital, lifesaving gender-affirming medication despite the overwhelming medical consensus for it.

Anti-trans bills that became law nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025, from 51 to 126. By July of 2026, another 62 had passed: a full year's worth in half a year. This does not even account for Texas, whose legislature does not meet in even years and which alone accounted for 130 bills introduced last session. And of course, it is not just the enacted legal persecution; MAP found trans people report harm to their well-being regardless of whether these bills became law.  

To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid. In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today. Trans America is fleeing red-state persecution at ten to twenty times that.

In short, trans people are being internally displaced within America's shores.

Where are they going? To cities in blue states, with strong blue-state protections for trans civil rights and gender identity protections, and environments that are less hostile. They are particularly attracted to cities with relatively low costs of living like Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Seattle. And this is no accident. Trans people are disproportionately impoverished—34% in poverty, 18% unemployed, 30% having experienced homelessness at some point in their life. Ask trans people who have moved or want to move what factors matter in the decision and 93% cite affordability and economic factors—statistically indistinguishable from the 92% who cite a state's legal protections. Among those who want to leave and haven't, 82% cite cost of relocation as the barrier, 56% employment, 49% housing. 

Thus, this modern Great Migration concentrates in cities with at least somewhat affordable housing—places like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are simply too expensive (though California is still a significant destination despite this). And this lack of options, and the ensuing concentration, strains local resources to the breaking point. A trans-led Seattle non-profit has helped 1,500 trans people flee since the 2024 election, compared to 70 in the 18 months prior.

Seattle's own LGBTQ Commission has asked the city to declare a civil emergency, describing the arrivals, in the language of international humanitarian law, as internally displaced persons: "Many IDPs have relocated from states such as Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, and Idaho due to anti-trans legislation, threats to personal safety, and barriers to healthcare and legal recognition." The mayor has so far stopped short of declaring one.

In short: trans Americans are increasingly being forced, by economic, legal and social factors, into a shrinking pool of cities that combine reasonable cost of living with strong legal protections—cities that are struggling to provide for this unprecedented internal displacement.

Those trans people who cannot afford to run are forced to hide.

Since November 2024, 55% of transgender adults report taking steps to be less visible as an LGBTQ person in their community—at work, at school—compared to 24% of LGBTQ people overall. This is what “eradication” looks like in practice. Instead of forcing the trans person to leave the state, the fascists are forcing the trans person to leave themselves. 

This is by design. We know because they have written it down. Executive Order 14168 directed the federal government to define sex as fixed at conception and to stop issuing accurate identity documents. The Supreme Court allowed the enforcement of this measure in November 2025. A cascade of orders reinstated the trans military ban and threatened hospital funding for providers that offered gender affirming care. Roughly half of federal datasets on health were altered to scrub the language—an Orwellian effort to scrub out inconvenient facts. In January, Trump told a crowd that "transgender insanity" was now "out of our schools and out of our lives."

In June, after the Supreme Court permitted states to bar trans girls from school sports, the White House press office published a document under the following headline: "Supreme Court Bolsters President Trump's Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity." Not restrict. Not regulate. Eliminate.

The document goes on to enumerate the apparatus with evident pride—passports, the military, research funding—and to boast that federal pressure has resulted in more than 40 hospitals and health systems ceasing care. Real harm, to real vulnerable people—and this administration boasted about it, because the cruelty is the point.

In February 2023, days after Kansas passed SB 180, which for legal purposes defined sex purely via reproductive capability, the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles praised the bill on his show precisely because it did not stop at minors: "You have to ban transgenderism entirely." The following week, at CPAC, he told the crowd that "for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology, at every level." But what came next is arguably even worse. Knowles argued that he could not be calling for genocide, because being trans is not a legitimate category of being. In short, we are not real people, so eliminating us cannot be genocide. 

In other words, this is state-driven forced displacement. It is state policy aimed at a targeted group, designed to make life unlivable for that group. And there is a reason that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued alerts specifically regarding the situation of American trans people.

No, there have not been mass killings.

But genocide scholars recognize that genocide operates on a continuum—first erasure and exclusion, then worse. In Gregory Stanton's framework, persecution is stage eight of ten, immediately preceding extermination. It is not hyperbole to say that the machinery of state operating upon trans life is genocidal in nature, and in intent. The state has said so itself, in its own press releases.

It has already created internal displacement that hasn't been seen in America in close to a hundred years outside natural disaster. It has already made trans life unlivable or precarious in much of the country. It has led to greater harassment and hostility. And it kills: a peer-reviewed study of more than 61,000 trans and nonbinary young people found that after anti-trans laws were enacted, suicide attempts rose 38 to 44 percent—and up to 72% among those under eighteen. 

Far from reporting honestly on these events and challenging these hostile narratives, the mainstream press has been an active collaborator in this effort to erase and further marginalize trans people. An analysis of 3,242 New York Times articles on transgender topics from 2014 to 2026 found a marked turn toward hostile framing beginning in 2022, with trans voices declining as opponents of trans rights rose. Media Matters and GLAAD found the paper quoted no trans person in two-thirds of its stories about anti-trans legislation. In February 2023, more than a thousand Times contributors and a coalition of a hundred organizations asked for three things: stop printing biased stories about trans people, meet with trans leaders, and hire trans journalists. None of these were done; instead matters only got worse. And thus has the New York Times lent, and currently lends, its reputation as “the paper of record” to the effort to delegitimize trans people as a category, to the point that the articles published in the Times are routinely cited in anti-trans legal briefs and legislative findings, sometimes within days of publication.

So what is to be done? What must liberals and leftists and everyone in between do in the face of this slow-rolling atrocity, this modern Jim Crow?

This is a non-exhaustive list, but, firstly: the line must be held on all further erosions of trans rights. No concessions on sports. No concessions on bathrooms. No concessions on gender-affirming care for minors. Such erosions are not only unjust, but they destroy political capital by causing trans people to be seen in various settings as less than equal—as ones who need not be given that which is due to equals.

Secondly, local, state, and municipal funding in sanctuary cities and states must be allocated in order to expand local and community resources to handle the ongoing influx. This includes housing assistance, relocation support, general healthcare support, and especially support for gender-affirming care, which in many cases has been interrupted or not even begun for trans refugees. The upside for these localities is that integrating this influx into local communities can invigorate the tax base and revitalize the community. Thus the human rights commitment becomes an investment in the community's future.

Thirdly, these municipalities must make structural changes to lower the cost of living and increase access to resources, regardless of what is done at the federal level. Even if a Democrat returns to the Oval Office in 2029, this will likely not change the legal or social situation in red states. The mass migration of trans people will likely continue regardless of who is in the White House. Thus, housing costs must be reduced by policy actions, and more housing supply must be made available, both by public and market means. One of the great failings of many ostensible sanctuary states is that for the most part, despite excellent legal protections, they are simply too expensive for impoverished trans people to move to.

American trans people are facing a monumental crisis. It is a crisis borne of the fact that we have become a recognizable subgroup within American demography, and we are a subgroup that challenges reactionary, so-called traditional understandings of gender and social order, and as such, we (and I say "we" as a member of the subgroup in question) have become a threat to be suppressed as a matter of state policy. It is a question of human rights and moral urgency that the American anti-fascist coalition center this ongoing emergency in its efforts to respond to our current crisis.

Featured image is Transgender Rights Protest in Aberdeen, by Lucas Kendall