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.

  • BiNonBi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    Definitely something you have to decide on your own in the end.

    I live in Minnesota. I typically refer to it as a blurple state. Externally it may have seen as solidly blue but internally it’s a bit more contested. Not uncommon for one of the chambers of the state legislature to be red (house is +2 R and senate is +1 D right now). Hasn’t been a Republican governor in a while but it’s not impossible.

    It’s still probably one of the safest states. The Republican party isn’t as bad as in other places. Even if they gained power it’s unlikely the same laws and policies other places are currently experiencing will be implemented here quickly.

    The ICE protests will eventually end (Or we’ll have much bigger issues on a national level). But Minnesota does have a lot of racial inequality and tension. There will probably be a continuing cycle of protest on those issues. Just hopefully not intentionally inflamed by the federal government. And honestly I think that’s a good thing. People feel confident enough that they can protest and things will change. There’s hope for a future.

    There are places outside The Cities too. Rochester is a good size city and home if Mayo and has a surprisingly technology sector with IBM. Duluth is surprise maritime city in the middle of a continent but I don’t actually know much about their economy or culture. Tons of medium to large towns. Honestly entirely too many for me to go over. Each of them unique.