From Dream Job to Exile: Why I Left the US for Ireland as a Trans Person

It's a hard thing to admit to myself, let alone others, but I'm effectively a refugee. I'm a UK citizen, but I lived in the US for more than a decade before leaving during Trump's first term in office. I went to the US, like many, for a job. The job. The absolute dream, offer you can't refuse, job. I arrived during George W's time. I wasn't particularly keen on him or his policies, but nothing he did either made me afraid or ashamed. Then came Obama, all eight years, which was mostly fine (though there were moments – something for another post sometime whenever).

After a hair under a decade, I left the dream job and went to the good job. The one that turned my finances around for the first time in my life, with some resemblance toward work/life balance. A couple of months later, Trump was elected. I knew immediately that it would be bad. Possibly very bad, and there was a good chance I'd have to leave the US because of it. By this time, I was (same-sex) married to a US citizen and was a green card holder eligible to apply for citizenship myself.

I lasted about another year and a half. Checking the news two or three times a day to see whether the final red line had been crossed, and it was time right now to head to the border, got to me eventually. I was done. My employer was multinational, so I was able to apply for an internal transfer to Europe. I got it, and my spouse and I left about two or three months later.

We spent five years in mainland Europe, then decided to move to Ireland. Easier language issues, some economic advantages, long term stability, the chance to buy somewhere we could afford, a plausible off-ramp to retirement in a decade or so, all played into the decision.

For me, the move was straightforward. As a UK citizen, I have right of residence here, so all I needed to do was show up and file some paperwork. For my spouse, it was far more difficult. The paperwork was significantly onerous, running to many hundreds of pages of forms, copies of documents, etc. They even requested our email and chat logs going back to the beginning of our relationship. It took nearly two years and an intervention from our immigration lawyers, but we're both now safely here. My spouse ended up living in Florida up until just before the election, so we were very grateful to be able to get them out before that (they are trans masc nonbinary, and potentially at risk).

I transitioned in the UK about 30 years ago. It was hard then, and honestly didn't improve hugely before I left in the mid noughties. I survived an attempted murder there, transphobically motivated, in the late 90s. Things seemed to improve somewhat while I was out of the country, but due to the terf inundation of all of the major parties, and particularly the Tories using anti-trans rhetoric as an election wedge issue, things have gone back to as bad as they were when I first transitioned. Or possibly worse, given the recent idiotic supreme court decision.

It's now pretty clear that I'm not welcome in either my chosen country (US) or my birth country (UK). My world has become a lot smaller, and I feel in far more danger than I have in decades. Though both myself and my spouse are in Ireland legally, via conventional immigration processes and not via a (legal!) asylum claim, we are nevertheless effectively refugees.

I am not looking for sympathy or pity. I'm in a far better position than many of the trans people that I know. If anything, this is a call-to-action. Don't obey in advance. If you are a cis person reading this, actively disobey. Don't collaborate, don't capitulate. Check on the trans people you know and love, and offer them help as you can. Make plans. Things can, and quite possibly will, get worse from here. I'm not just suggesting in doing online keyboard warrior duty (though that isn't nothing!), but rather figuring out how you can directly help, personally, one on one if you have to. There is a good chance that NGOs and charities will be targeted and shut down if they have any kind of public profile, so run silent, run deep.

I have my own plans I'm working toward. This blog is a (small) part of that. I won't announce things before they are ready, for obvious reasons, and I suggest that you are similarly careful with what you say, particularly online. For example, this blog is hosted outside the US, in jurisdictions with significant privacy protections. Since I post openly, it will be easy enough to track what I say (so, please be careful to not disclose anything in comments that you might not want to be seen), but it will be extremely difficult to stop me from speaking.