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.