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.
- Most of 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.
I live in a blue state at the moment and it’s honestly really great :3 lots of openly trans people galavanting around. Lots of fear still (we’ve had ICE incidents as well) but being in the large community is a huge relief
I’ve lived all over tho and it depends on where exactly you end up, too. You want to make sure you’re in a blue area of the state if you know what I mean
There’s definitely a lot to be said for staying where you are and keeping up the good fight. But don’t feel like you have to take the world on your back, you know? Trans people are a minuscule minority, we don’t really have the direct voting power to affect things that heavily. If you want to be a type of ambassador, and try to sway people by being awesome, that’s great. But living a joyful life is also a potent form of resistance, and there are still plenty or people whose minds you can sway in blue states. Even the most accepting places are still only like 60/40.
Ultimately I feel like there are no guarantees. Maybe you make the perfect plan in the bluest city in the bluest state but it turns out your neighbor is a transphobe and makes your life miserable. But in general I feel like my experience here is just so different from what I hear about other places. It’s a big decision, wishing you the best no matter what