So, is it time to panic?

How two trans men made an impossible decision for their family in the wake of rising national transphobic attacks

My therapist, coming to me from what little of her home I could make out in the Zoom window, held the silence between us for longer than usual. I’d just told her something I’m sure many trans people are telling their therapists this week:

“I’m thinking of leaving the country.”

It came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think it through, and I didn’t know that I believed it until it was hanging in the air between us. I wanted her to ask another question now– any question. Where did I want to go? What would I do there? With what money? But she held the silence the way only a practiced therapist can, letting me feel the full rush of complicated emotions that were turning my neck hot and my cheeks pink. I started to explain the dozens of reasons I’d mentally prepared before our session, but the words weren’t coming together the way I wanted them to. I stopped and fell into silence again, frustrated.

“What phone calls are you going to make before you decide?” she asked.

I listed a couple of friends who had previously promised to help with our animals and moving plans before she cut me off.

No, not logistical phone calls. Whose expertise did I trust? Who would know if we, as a country, were on the edge of a crisis that necessitated drastic action? Who might have the information I needed before I decided to flee completely?

Oh shit. That’s me. I’m that person.

I have spent the last fifteen years of my life becoming the expert I now needed. Because before I was the 34-year-old trans guy with two days of chin stubble and three comfort beverages sitting before him at 11am on a Tuesday, I was a career teacher causing a lot of good trouble at school board meetings on behalf of my trans students. I pushed for (and passed) our district’s nondiscrimination policy. I advised our school’s Queer Student Alliance and built and curated a 200-title queer library. When I began my transition, I documented my experiences online and grew a platform with more than 400,000 followers. I ran workshops and booked speaking events about our history, culture, education, and healthcare. I trained teachers and college students and doctors and CEOs. When I left the classroom, I spent eight months writing a book literally called Teach Like an Ally. And this week, Out Magazine, a queer publication with the highest circulation in the country, called me an LGBTQ+ icon.

There wasn’t a single person I could think of who might have more immediate practical knowledge about transgender life and safety in the United States at that exact moment.

And I had no idea what to do.

Well fuck.

“I advised our school’s Queer Student Alliance and built and curated a 200-title queer library.”

When we look back…

I thought back to a field trip I once chaperoned in the early fall of 2016 at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. While forty teenagers spent the bus ride home talking quietly about the horrors of German concentration camps and the brutality of Nazi atrocities, I couldn’t break my mind away from a tableau at the very beginning of the tour. Before museum guests cross through the life-size iron gates of Auschwitz, they’re invited to experience what it was like to live in Germany at the dawn of Hitler’s rise to power. In one scene, a spotlight jumps between a handful of gray mannequin couples having lunch at a Berlin cafe. They’re discussing the small concerns they have about the growing prevalence of fascism, but very few of them – if any – are sounding the alarm.

Even then, still a handful of months away from the first Trump presidency, the scene made me nauseous. None of these people had the gift of knowing they weren’t just riding a temporary wave of political hostility. They had no idea they were only the first stop on a tour of history with no exit ramps. No one could tell them that it was only days from being too late to turn back.

It’s the same nausea mirrored in the Broadway musical Cabaret, where the cast of characters are largely too wrapped up in the smaller dramas of their lives in pre-war Berlin to notice that their story is set just three years before Germany started passing overtly anti-Jewish laws, including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which prohibited Jewish people from holding government jobs. Before Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, before Kristallnacht and the Nuremberg Laws, German streets were filled with people too busy to notice that they were walking along the edge of a cliff.

And we forget quickly.

Just a few weeks ago, Adam Lambert, who is playing the Emcee in the current Broadway run of Cabaret, had to interrupt his performance to chastise laughing audience members during a musical number.

“No. This is not a comedy,” he said. “Pay attention.”

And I am.

As a high school English teacher, I dedicated my life to teaching the works of figures like Frederick Douglass, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison. Through literature, I introduced thousands of students to the horrific realities of residential schools in Zitkala-Sa’s Impressions of an Indian Childhood and of Japanese internment in George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy. Young adults in my AP Language classes wrote essays about the Lavender Scare and the McCarthy hearings. The warning signs of impending brutality aren’t limited to far away places in distant history. They’ve always been right here.

To borrow a line from crime and horror Youtuber Mark Nichols:

“The next time that somebody tells you 'the government wouldn't do that,' oh yes they would.”

So last summer, when my husband Xilo (pronounced Shy-low, a shortening of the Aztec name Xīlōnen) and I watched Donald Trump raise a single fist in defiance after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, we knew it was time to start preparing ourselves.

No one was going to tell us when to act. There wouldn’t be an announcement letting us know what to do. The revolution would not be televised. We would have to figure it out.

So we started a list on the whiteboard we keep stuck to the front of our refrigerator:

“Apocalypse Checklist”

Dramatic? Sure. But it kept us focused as we slalomed through the months that came after, checking off item after item. Update gender markers on expedited passports? Check. Order additional copies of our birth certificates? Check. Secure automatic pharmacy refills and shipping for testosterone? Check.

The expo marker hovered over “officially change our last name.” We had just married in June, and hadn’t legally updated our names at the courthouse. It was $400, and we didn’t have the money. Would it even be wise to make ourselves easier to find? We kept that task un-checked.

I wrote a guide for other trans people like us who might be scrambling for actionable steps.

“Start thinking about these things now,” I said. “Systems you think are assured are not. Institutions that you think cannot fail absolutely can.”

At the time, I was working at a public health nonprofit that received a majority of its funding from the CDC. Because our focus was in education and research around tobacco and cancer in LGBTQ+ communities, I expressed concern to our higher-ups. What was the plan if the CDC pulled our funding?

“That won’t happen,” I heard.

I wasn’t as sure. I was either the priestess Cassandra, cursed by Apollo to be disbelieved in her prophecies about the impending Trojan war, or I was an alarmist in a tinfoil hat, yelling on a street corner with my cardboard sign.

“We had just married in June, and hadn’t legally updated our names at the courthouse. It was $400, and we didn’t have the money. Would it even be wise to make ourselves easier to find?”

When we look inward…

My therapist lifted her eyebrows to catch my attention. The sun was getting higher in the window behind her, shortening the shadows in the room.

“I know you want to use the patterns of history to help you here,” she said. “But what happens when you trust yourself? What is it that you feel? What is your gut telling you?”

Like many trans people, I learned very young how to divorce myself from my body and the feelings I sometimes store inside of it. It’s a habit shared by a host of historically marginalized people, and it can be very hard to unlearn. Because when you’re told right from the jump that you can’t trust yourself and that your experiences will be dismissed if they don’t meet the expectations of others, sometimes you just pull the plug completely. Tapping into “listening to my body” has taken a long time, and it’s a skill that has been instrumental in my own healing.

I slowed my breathing and closed my eyes.

I noticed first the feelings that were distinctly absent. Though I was definitely distressed, my throat wasn’t tight, and my stomach was settled. Whenever I have moments in my life where I act outside of my values – lying to my father, self-abandoning in relationships, withholding my generosity – my throat closes and my intestines do somersaults. There was a year once where my body fought so hard against my choices that I lost 75 pounds.

But that wasn’t happening now. Instead, a heat was rising inside of me, prickling my skin and sending electric signals to every one of my nerve endings. As a public school teacher, it was familiar. This was the same feeling I would get as I crouched with 35 teenagers under laminated plywood desks, the blackout curtains I’d bought myself pulled over our double paned windows. As we waited for the “all clear” announcement over the loudspeaker, my eyes would dart around the room, mapping a plan for us.

If someone tries the door, the lock should stop them. If it doesn’t, I should be able to get to the fire extinguisher in time. If I can’t, I can use the baseball bat. The bathroom pass is missing. Kayla is still outside. Another teacher probably pulled her into a classroom, but if we need to run, I’ll take the path to the bathrooms first. I can get us to the hills behind the parking lot in two minutes.

This was also the same feeling pinging inside of me the morning we learned that an eighth grader from a neighboring middle school had ended his own life, likely motivated by unanswered anti-queer bullying. I stayed up for two nights with that feeling spreading in my chest as I typed up a proposal that I dropped on an assistant superintendent’s desk the next day. We needed an LGBTQ liaison, like the ones employed in every major school district around us, I told him. They bounced me between meetings for a couple of months before the super changed districts and my proposal was dropped completely.

There was fear in that feeling, sure, but there was also clarity. I wasn’t feeling frantic or caged or out of control – I was laser focused.

Because, though there is little comfort in vindication on the edge of the apocalypse, I was still right.

In the two weeks since the inauguration:

• The State Department has stopped issuing gender marker changes on US passports

• The CDC has slashed its funding to groups like the one in which I was working and halted studies using “forbidden words” such as “gender” and “LGBT”

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is no longer processing claims related to gender identity or sexual orientation

• Transgender troops are being openly expelled from the military

• Public schools have been threatened with pulled funding for promoting “indoctrination” based on “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology”

• The executive branch has issued a healthcare ban for trans youth that includes individuals up to age 19

• A federal bathroom ban threatens to prosecute any person using a facility on federal property that does not align with their sex at birth

And all of this on the background of Trump’s declaration that there are only two state-defined “official genders,” of which this author and every trans, nonbinary, and intersex person he knows, is out of compliance.

On the phone later, my father would argue that most of these policies are “just” executive orders, and will likely be challenged in court. And he’s not wrong. Read the wording of any one of these declarations and it’s immediately suspect as to who could enforce them, or what organized follow through might even look like.

But in a country filled with people willing to pre-comply, it doesn’t matter.

Like we saw with the questionably-phrased “Don’t Say Gay” bill governing classrooms in Florida in 2022, sometimes vague demands and nebulous threats are enough to scare some of us into following immoral guidelines without resistance. The root cause of pre-compliance could be fear, apathy, or even enthusiastic ideological agreement. In the worst cases, those of us who will be hit the hardest by these changes, like those queer people who are all too thrilled about subtracting the “T” from “LGBT,” will welcome it until it’s too late. They face the wave with open arms right up until it knocks them into the sand.

“We needed an LGBTQ liaison, like the ones employed in every major school district around us. They bounced me between meetings for a couple of months before the super changed districts and my proposal was dropped completely.”

When we look forward…

Ultimately, Xilo and I went to the beach to make our decision together.

We booked two nights at a near-empty off season hotel and drove for four hours from our home in the desert as we talked through our options. As two lifelong academics who are always neck-deep in distracting projects, we have our best conversations on the road.

We knew before we made it out of the driveway that we couldn’t stay. For reasons related to family, trauma, and a hundred private details I will not be publishing on the internet, we’d already accepted that we would have to leave the property where we have spent the last year building our home. In this climate, buying or renting somewhere else in the US wasn’t feasible. Moving abroad didn’t feel right either. We didn’t want to run away, but we wanted to be prepared.

And so, as we sat on a fallen redwood tree, embedded in the sand and stripped of its bark by years of ocean wind, we made our decision.

I would cash in my retirement (somewhere, my father clutched his chest like Obi Wan Kenobi as the Empire evaporated Alderaan) and we would buy an Airstream. We want to stay mobile, to have the option for a quick exit if we need one, without giving in to fear. We want to explore the country, visiting and learning from all of the trans people our government is telling us do not exist. We want to renew our vows in a hundred beautiful places, even if the Supreme Court tries to dissolve our marriage. We want to write, and paint, and record, and draw, and live. We want to put our foot on the gas, not the brakes.

The transition will be a hard one – over the next month, we will have to sell most of our belongings to raise as much money for this change as we can. We’ve found a home for our thirteen chickens, but we will need to find families for our two large dogs, whose size and general distaste for travel would make the shift to a small aluminum tube particularly cruel.

We will also have to process – again – a life without guarantees.

So, is it time to panic?

No, but it is time to make decisions. There are no authorities here, and all of us will have to reckon with what it means to be the engineers of our own fates. The world won’t wait, and neither should we.

Want to help?

Xilo and I have put together a GoFundMe if you’d like to donate to the next step in our story. You can also pre-order my book, buy something we’ve made, or become a paid subscriber here on Substack. You can click “Join chat” below to become a member and get access to exclusive content and chat forums.