“You Lost Me When You Got Rid of Your Dog”

How the casual cruelty of trans “allies” stands to do the most harm in the face of our complete eradication

“Do You Fucking Promise?”

I was about half way back to my truck when the tears started. At first they were the sneaky kind that wet my whole face and started to dampen the collar of my shirt before I noticed them at all. And when I realized I was alone – that I was surrounded only by endless acres of snow and pine in every direction – I let them take over. Sobs broke into wails, peppered with an occasional “I’m sorry” whimpered to nobody and sucked away by the frigid wind. By the time I climbed into the cab of my truck and pried my wet gloves off with my teeth to start the heater, I had settled into the finale: red eyes, sniffles, and heavy sighs. I was more than 700 miles from home, and I spent two days and four tanks of gas to get here. Back at the bottom of the hill I just summited, in a cabin nestled in the heart of the Oregon wilderness, I had just seen my dog for the last time. I knew it, but he did not, and it felt very much like my heart was dissolving inside of me.

The reason dates back to July of 2024, when Donald Trump was tackled to the ground by secret service agents in Butler, Pennsylvania.

It was the image that emerged after (of the bloodied septuagenarian with his little fist in the air) that caused my husband and I to start to get serious about our “Plan B.” He might actually win, we realized, and we would have to be prepared. That same afternoon, we piled into the car together and headed for my childhood home to find the documents I would need to apply for a passport.

Why the drama of it all? Well, my husband and I are both transgender. And more so, I have worked in trans activism and advocacy within public health and public education for just north of a decade. I’ve written at some length about why this administration is a particular danger to trans people, and how many of the predictions that we made in the face of Project 2025 have already come to pass – all at a chillingly swift pace.

Our original plan (“Plan A”) was to grow the property where we’d been living for the last year. We had two dogs, two cats (these factions did not get along, and were relegated to different quadrants of the house), and fourteen chickens on a two acre plot of desert in the heart of southern California. It was here, in a town I called “Great Value Joshua Tree,” where we hoped to settle for the foreseeable future. Maybe get a couple of goats? Host art retreats? The land wasn’t worth much and it was owned within our family, so it felt just about perfect. After the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania, we pivoted to “Plan B:” get our documents in order and try to make our property as self-sustaining as possible. We fundraised for a solar battery, started sourcing options for a greenhouse, and hoped for the best. We held tight through the winter, bracing for the inauguration. Then, in an act of cosmic divine comedy, we lost our only hold on stability.

As the executive orders rolled in, stripping us of our federally recognized personhood, our right to documentation, our housing and employment protections, our healthcare, our dignity… the ground beneath us was suddenly stripped away. The home we’d built in the first year of our marriage now had to be vacated as soon as possible. There were no other options. We couldn’t stay.

Time for Plan C.

I won’t get in to all of the reasons we opted for a more mobile life (if you want to read about it in more detail, it’s all here), but only a few days after parking our 27 foot Airstream Flying Cloud behind a friend’s Bed & Breakfast a hundred miles from our starting point in the desert, it was time to drive again – this time across the Oregon border with our husky, Balto.

Our other dog, Stella, a 90 pound shepherd that my husband Xilo rescued after she was found wandering the wilderness in New Mexico, was already with her new family. Gentle and well behaved and generally lazy, it was pretty easy to find a couple with a pair of young children who were ecstatic to use Stella as a doting companion and gaming sofa. Balto – a whirlwind of a two-year-old who rose to internet fame for stealing kitchen knives out of our dishwasher – was a harder sell. I spent weeks vetting potential homes for him, interviewing folks on the phone as I packed our lives into shoebox-sized tubs and sold off the rest.

Finally, I found them – a family living on 175 mountain acres, 17 of them behind a good, secure, Balto-proof fence. They had three dogs already, and were willing to welcome my boy into their pack.

So now here I was, driving back down the hill and across the threshold of a massive wooden entry gate. All of Balto’s things were in the back: his crate, bed, blankets, toys, treats, and a massive bag of dog food. My last task would be to drop these things off at the front of the house as Balto played inside, unaware. My husband and I are seasoned “dog people,” and the Irish goodbye is a tested strategy for minimizing the pain of separation. Like toddlers, dogs often don’t know something is wrong unless they pick up on it from us. Make a big show of the goodbye and I might have some more satisfying closure, but he would likely panic when the door closed behind me. I bit my lip as I loaded his stuff onto the porch. His new person, who had worked with me for weeks with an astounding level of patience as we weathered changed plans and unexpected winter storms, pulled me in for a hug as I prepared to leave for good.

“We’ll take such good care of him,” they said.

I could feel the tears again. I blinked them back and shut my eyes tight.

“Do you fucking promise?”

“Ally Crime”

A familiar despair crept in as I wound my way through the rain back to my hotel. I felt it last as a public high school teacher the morning after Fox News published both where I worked and my full dead name on the front page of their online rag. The headline suggested that my in-classroom library featuring LGBTQ+ titles was tantamount to child abuse, and I was a dangerous predator who should be removed from my classroom, where I had served my community for more than twelve years. As the emails and calls and death threats rolled in from across the country, I buried myself under the covers and watched The Lord of the Rings on repeat for three days. The feeling was very much nothing is okay, and it never will be again. This is the end.

My despair metastasized into anger as I pulled into the hotel parking lot. At least when I was on Fox, I thought, the calls weren’t coming from inside the house.

And it’s true: though Xilo and I received an overwhelming amount of support when we announced our decision (and call for help) publicly, we knew we would also weather what we have started to call “ally crime.” We’ve both received messages and comments from a very specific kind of “ally” that are all different flavors of the same ill-advised empathy-voided ice cream cone. They usually rhyme with something like this, which I received in a comment section this morning:

“You lost me when you got rid of your dog. He doesn’t understand why you’re leaving. Humans do, animals don’t. Cruel behavior from a couple running from cruel behavior.”

I don’t answer messages like this anymore, because after four years of public-facing work for my community (and marrying an emotionally intelligent man with a masters degree in social work), I’ve learned that they aren’t actually talking to me. As Xilo would say: “everything is projection.”

Jennifer, and “allies” like her, aren’t actually curious about our reasoning or our safety, nor does she have realistic solutions, because she doesn’t know us. A quick scroll through her post history on Instagram confirms my suspicions– reposts of social justice one-liners from Twitter, trans support hotlines, news briefs from the ACLU, and a bio that reads “Mom. Survivor. Friend. Mouthy.” She’s a follower of mine, Dylan Mulvaney, and Jazz Jennings.

I have to be careful here, because many of our allies will find a way to use our anger as a reason to rescind their support. All trans people are just one frustrated huff (or even a gentle calling-in) away from alienating another swath of fragile relationships in a time where our needs are high and our allies are sparse. What many of these people don’t want to face is a reality that those of us within the community have known for a long time: their support has always been distant and conditional.

It’s giving “I care about trans people, but not individual trans people– just the concept of them.”

Because Jennifer (and allies like her) care about trans people enough to post suicide hotlines and make angry calls to senators, but not enough to trust us to make challenging decisions in the face of our methodical and intentional eradication. We are sympathetic as long as we are helpless and conceptual. We are easy to love when we’re begging for donations for gender affirming healthcare, but not when we’re backed into a corner and fighting to stay alive.

So how is any of this about projection?

Our decision to rehome our dogs is a painful one, and it suggests something that many allies haven’t been able to process yet: what is happening to trans people in this country is serious and urgent. It will not be solved from behind a screen. Our allies sit in an enormous place of privilege as they watch it play out from the safety of their relatively protected lives. The projection comes from a place of both guilt and powerlessness. If we really had no other reasonable choice with our dogs, that must mean that things are much worse than they imagined. And if that’s true, why aren’t they doing more?

I can’t answer that question. I’ve learned over the last few years that I will never survive in a way that satisfies and heals everyone else.

Because when someone messages or comments or speaks in anger about my choices, it is in service of projecting their own traumas and fears instead of feeling them. Someone doesn’t call themselves a “survivor” without carrying a lot of their own pain around. But that pain doesn’t belong to me, and I will not carry it for them.

The Secret Third Option

Many of the people who reach out to us about the dogs remind me very much of my high school students whenever I taught units around ethics and philosophy. To start class, I would present my kids with a classic ethical conundrum to help them parse through their own decision making. Most commonly, it would be something like the trolley problem.

“A trolley is headed toward five people who are tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever to divert the trolley, but it will instead hit a single person. What do you do?” I would ask as I drew out the scenario on the whiteboard.

Anyone who has taught or studied ethics knows the point of this exercise. In instances where there are no harmless options, will you implicate yourself directly in the harm to do as much good as possible? It’s a visual hypothetical used to ask a tough question, and there is no right answer. The point is to grapple with challenging feelings.

But we are, largely, conditioned to fear challenging feelings. We think that the goal is to avoid them. This was always reflected in at least a few student answers.

“I would simply find a way to save everyone. I rig a series of ropes and pulleys to stop the trolley in time.”

“I throw myself in front of the trolley, heroically sacrificing myself and saving all six people.”

“I wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. I’ve never seen a trolley.”

But there are no secret third options in a mental exercise like the trolley problem. These aren’t clever solutions, they’re avoidant swerves around engaging with the core reflective question. A lot of people need there to be a way out of a feeling, especially when it’s too painful to face.

“You can have a dog in a trailer!” we hear, as our “allies” try to find the secret third option.

And yeah, you can have a dog in a trailer.

But I love my dog, and I know it would be cruel to try.

We are keeping our two cats, who harbor a historic antagonism against Balto. They spent the year they shared a property together growling and hissing on opposite sides of a glass door. Previous attempts to integrate them have always ended in a “band aid moment.”

And Balto, who came to us entirely by accident when he wandered through our gate, has always needed an incredible amount of daily exercise to ward off his destructive habits. We would need to coordinate stopping only in completely fenced, dog-friendly parks and land without weight or noise restrictions.

These, plus a hundred other considerations revolving around unsure and unstable finances, weather and comfort, border crossing restrictions, and issues of space and mobility, landed us in exactly one place: we would need to find new homes for our pups. For Xilo and I, facing a future with vanishing access to medical care and no employment or housing protections? Existing in a country where, according to our government, not only are we unimportant – we do not exist at all? The decision wasn’t easy, but it was inevitable, and we took it very seriously.

And still, there will be people who (with no information) will hunt for the secret third option. This is because the secret third option is an escape from feeling. They aren’t in our DMs with real solutions, but for their own processing. We aren’t people in that moment, we are a poor replacement for a diary.

And that is cruelty.

If I Let Myself Feel It

Grief demands to be felt.

I remember so clearly what it was like to fall in love with Balto when he first wandered into our lives. On our third night, after he’d stolen a whole loaf of bread from the tallest counter in the kitchen, Xilo was sitting with him on the couch, rubbing his forehead as his eyes started to get heavy with sleep.

“It’s okay,” Xilo said to him, “It takes time to build trust and security. We can be patient for you.”

And we were. There was no behavior we weren’t willing to work through. He stole sandwiches out of the trash, ate shoes as we slept, and once brought a half-dead bird into the living room while we were doing yoga on the floor. We never faltered. We changed the environment to keep him out of trouble, socialized and loved him, and worked our asses off to teach him some basic commands. No longer a bread thief, Balto now rolls onto his back when he sees us coming, lifting a single leg into the air when we say “do you have a belly? Let me see.”

Leaving him wasn’t selfish, and I know that. His new family has been sending me videos of him running at full speed in the snow, dodging twenty foot pine trees as he plays with the other dogs in his pack. He’s napping by the fire as someone else is scratching behind his ears.

I wish that someone was me, but it’s not. Balto will be fine, and I will heal too.

Even as the anger still lives inside of me.

I’m angry at the politicians using my life as a way to distract from the price of eggs.

I’m angry at the allies who love my pain but fear my rage.

I’m angry at everyone who gets to ignore that this is happening at all.

I’m angry at the family who let us feel safe at our home in the desert, who let us believe there was nothing left to learn about them.

And then I breathe and look around.

Even in the pain, the life we are curating for ourselves is beautiful. There is snow on the ground here too, and our friends have built a sledding ramp. Our cats are napping in the windows of our Airstream. My husband is making soup on the stove, and he is looking just so cute today.

I want to cry again, and I tell myself “This is temporary. This feeling is big, but if I let myself feel it, it will fade.”

And it will.

One of our family mottoes has been “We’re never down for long.” Because, in the face of everything, we still believe that being trans is a gift. If I were assigned male at birth and socialized as my father’s son, there’s a chance I wouldn’t be able to cry at all. My life has given me the chance to connect to my own ability to feel. Transitioning has also given me new access to anger in a way that once didn’t feel possible. Very few people have had the chance to experience a social and emotional word that transcends the expectations of gender completely.

I do feel lucky, and whole. Just maybe not right now.