- The nonprofit TRANSport provides support to transgender Americans who want to leave the country.
- The group has received more than 100 applications from potential émigrés in the past few weeks.
In anticipation of this story being published, Rynn Azerial Willgohs planned to warn the local police in North Dakota so they could increase protection patrols near her home.
Willgohs, a 51-year-old transgender woman who's active in the LGBTQ-rights community in Fargo, has endured severe harassment, doxing, and stalking and has had to move homes. The next time she relocates, she hopes it will be to Iceland.
When Willgohs visited the remote island nation in the Atlantic on the northernmost fringes of Europe for the first time last year, she was struck by the level of acceptance and the difference in social attitudes. In the next couple of years, Willgohs plans to go into self-imposed exile and leave North Dakota for a place that feels more secure and has more protections for LGBTQ people.
Amid an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country, Willgohs helped found TRANSport — a new organization to help "at-risk" transgender people leave the hostile environment in the US and relocate to a "more accepting world," says its website.
She said the group had received more than 100 applications in the past few weeks.
TRANSport aims to give financial assistance to those who want to move abroad, help get their legal documents in order, and offer general advice and support to navigate the process.
"It's a life-saving measure for many people," Willgohs told Insider.
'They call us pedophiles'
The team at TRANSport creates an individualized strategy for anyone seeking to leave the US, whether to Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, or elsewhere. The "Trans Rights Map" resource on the group's website illustrates which countries offer the best protections for trans and gender-nonconforming people.
Eris Rhoades is a new client, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. Rhoades, who lives in Minnesota, has wanted to leave the country for some time because of America's flawed healthcare system, lax gun laws, and the country's general "desensitization" to violence, she said.
As a trans woman in her mid-20s, the recent barrage of anti-trans legislation and transphobic politics across the country has made her decision to leave even more pressing, she told Insider.
Politicians get away with "spreading misinformation about trans and LGBT people. They make us out to be monsters, they call us pedophiles" and "use God as their justification for doing it," she said.
After hearing about the silencing of Zooey Zephyr, the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana state legislature, Rhoades' mind is made up. She filled out TRANSport's intake form and is in the process of getting her documentation in order — first and foremost, legally changing her name.
She is considering going to Iceland, like Willgohs, or possibly Portugal.
She hopes to make it out of the country on a student visa, but she's still at the beginning of a potentially months-long process. "I hope things don't get really, really bad in the meantime," she said.
Willgohs said TRANSport plans to use various methods — including student visas, digital-nomad visas, work visas, or possibly asylum claims — to legally allow people to live in other countries. Willgohs hopes to procure a work visa for her move.
While living as an LGBTQ person in the US has always been fraught with danger and discrimination, community members say they've recently seen an increasing number of red flags recently.
Willgohs said the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the legislative sessions in North Dakota have been particularly "abysmal" in the last few months. The state has advanced a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills this year. The Human Rights Campaign recently condemned North Dakota for targeting the existence of trans and nonbinary people "for no reason at all, other than discrimination."
Fleeing the 'land of the free'
TRANSport is part of an increasingly visible infrastructure that helps Americans — often ultra-wealthy ones — who want to émigraté.
Since "the tumult and instability of the Trump years," the trend of Americans trying to leave the country has been "much more prevalent," Jayesh Rathod, a law professor and the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University, told Insider.
In a new research paper, "Fleeing the Land of the Free," Rathod outlines how "US citizens have fled the country, filing approximately 14,000 asylum claims since 2000." Given the country's "recent flirtation with authoritarianism," there could be a "larger exodus of US citizens," he writes.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, thousands of new users joined r/AmerExit, a group on Reddit for Americans wanting to move abroad, The New Republic reported. Members of marginalized groups, such as Black and LGBTQ people and Asian Americans, have signaled in the forum they feel the US is becoming increasingly unsafe, the media outlet said.
'It just doesn't compute that there would be a US citizen who would want to leave'
While people seek to leave the country for many reasons, applying for asylum is likely out of the question for the time being.
It would be tough to claim asylum elsewhere as a queer or trans US citizens, because the prevailing wisdom is that "most of the harm that queer Americans experience is from private actors, not from the government itself," Rathod told Insider, which, he added, is "very debatable."
Before claiming asylum elsewhere, a trans person experiencing violence would need to prove they could not "internally relocate" and move to a blue state — similar to the trend of people who need abortion access going to states that are abortion safe havens.
While certain rights are "on paper" in "trans refuge" states such as Minnesota or California, having official legal protection is not necessarily enough, Willgohs said. Trans people still face disproportionate social discrimination and violence all across the country.
So while claiming asylum or refugee status would be near impossible at the moment, the fact that Americans are considering it points to the level of desperation trans people are feeling.
"I wish TRANSport didn't have to be a thing. I wish that we didn't live in a country where our rights are regularly debated in our government," Lillian Guetter, the president of the Fargo Pride Collective and a TRANSport collaborator, told Vice News' Anya Zoledziowski earlier this year. "But I'm glad Rynn has stepped up and made these big moves for us."
Across the US, institutional transphobia is rampant as legal protections for transgender people are being eroded. Forty-five states have proposed anti-trans bills in 2023, according to Track Trans Legislation. These politics are being increasingly accepted by the public — a recent Washington Post survey found clear majorities of Americans support Republican-lead anti-trans policies.
Trans Americans are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people, according to a 2021 UCLA study. A 2022 Insider investigation found that at least 175 transgender people were killed across the US over the past five years, and only three cases were charged as hate crimes. A few weeks ago, a transgender woman who stars in a forthcoming documentary was fatally shot in Atlanta.
But people trying to leave the country based on increasing LGBTQ-phobia face another obstacle, Rathold said.
"The US has a long-standing narrative as a haven for LGBTQ people, and with cases like this, it upends that narrative," Rathod said. "It just doesn't compute that there would be a US citizen who would want to leave, because it means you have to recognize the real conditions the community is facing."
Is leaving the answer?
Organizers at TRANSport and others hoping to leave the country have faced criticism from some advocates, who say that it's essential to stay and fight for improved legal protections. And people face discriminatory, racist, transphobic, or generally hateful policies and attitudes in Europe and worldwide.
Nowhere in the world is a "utopia for the LGBTQ community, that's the reality we're living in," Rathod said. "Most people who are thinking through these questions understand it's an individual choice."
Rhoades said moving somewhere completely unfamiliar is "scary," but continuing to live in the US, with the way the politics are going, "is even scarier."
Willgohs said she supported anyone who wanted to "stay and fight," but being an outspoken activist in Fargo has taken a toll. "I don't have to be here. I don't have to be in a physical environment where I could be murdered or attacked on the street," she said.
She said she sometimes likes to tease the hostile commenters in online threads. "You want us gone?" she says. "Donate to our cause, we'll be happy to go."