My wife and I (both trans) have been talking about moving to Minnesota for safety reasons since the presidential election, since our rights are constitutionally protected there. We currently live in a large, progressive city in a battlegrounds state that has no laws that either help or hurt us as trans people. Increasingly, my wife has become hesitant about leaving, especially after everything happening in Minneapolis (it hit harder for us because we have friends who live there), and I don’t know what to do either. These are the pros and cons, as I see it:

Benefits of staying

  • Our lives and jobs are here.
  • All our friends are here, including other queer people we feel like we’re abandoning.
  • Lower likelihood of being hatecrimed due to population sizes and crime rates.
  • Not living in a national protest epicenter.
  • If we’re lucky, nothing worse will happen in Wisconsin.
  • Maybe helping making our state and city a better place to live instead of just abandoning it.

Drawbacks of staying

  • Having no laws that protect us leaves us defenseless against state and federal rollbacks on our rights.
  • Buying a house and then being trapped in the event of a single bad election over the course of our lifetimes.
  • A governor using unilateral DMV authority to interpret trans identity as ID fraud, like what was done in Florida.
  • Lack of jobs and job security due to brain drain leading skilled workers and democrats to move to Illinois and Minnesota.
  • Uncertainty that trans people will ever be legally protected in our state in our lifetime.
  • Generally disliking the binge-drinking, redneck, put-cheese-on-literally-everything culture of our state.
  • The exhaustion of living in a battlegrounds state and every election being a bloodbath and an existential fight to preserve our existence, for the rest of our lives.

So I was hoping for some advice from the Lemmy trans community.

  • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.socialEnglish
    23·
    4 days ago

    I’m the parent of a trans kid, I am not trans myself. We moved from a deep red state to Minnesota a few years ago, for reasons like yours, my sister and her wife made the move as well.

    I can’t tell you what the experience has been like for my son. I can tell you what it felt like from my perspective. The state we lived in is where our friends and family lived and mostly all still live. The state government was constantly coming up with new threats. Attempting to criminalize medical treatment for our kid. The school was… “Tolerant” but all of the actors didn’t act when presented with the harassment my kid dealt with.

    Everyone around us went about their lives as though nothing was happening, as my spouse and I felt the weight of a state government that ignored us at best and at worst seemed actively malicious.

    The weight we didn’t realize we were carrying constantly was enormous and it lifted quite quickly.

    It was hard on all of us, making new friends as an adult (and in a relatively rural community) feels impossible at times. But I don’t fear our state government.

    There are resources in the cities for transplants, even if you make the choice willingly it’s still a traumatic experience. You have to decide if it’s worth it.