A Place to Be

It’s a Thursday night in October 2023, and I’m bundled up in my red puffy jacket, walking back and forth on the side of the field to keep warm. I am in Newport, Oregon, and I am doing an everyday thing, here alongside other mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and aunts and cousins and teachers. We are cheering on the high school’s JV girls’ soccer team. My daughter Emma is out there. She’s not the star, not the weakest player. She’s a contributor: running, breathing, laughing, trying hard. I see the coach say something to her, and she nods, not taking her eyes off the play, concentrating. She jogs upfield about ten yards.

Even though we are new to this school, new to this small town, right now I am just a soccer mom. I feel something buzzing through my body: a giddy mix of joy, pride, and an overwhelming flood of relief that thrums through me like caffeine jitters. I have been tense and on edge, on guard, for months, and now I suddenly feel like I could fall down on the ground in ecstasy or sprint to the other end of the field. But I don’t do either of those things, because I am hoping to fit in, a mom just like the others. Instead, I get my phone out and take photo after photo of my daughter. I will send them to my husband, my parents, my friends, everyone who knows us, everyone who knows her. I got her here, and she’s out there, being a teenager, doing what the other girls are doing. We are safe.

A few weeks ago, I was at home in Texas, where I have a job that I like, good friends and colleagues, a husband, a daughter in her senior year of high school, a home with a yard that needs attention, my sweet old dog, and my cats, and my eight chickens. But things had changed very quickly for my younger daughter and our family, and, to save her life, I packed what I needed most into the car, took my child, and fled. Three and a half days of driving later, we walked up the concrete steps of Emma’s new school for back-to-school night. The teachers, the staff, and the principal knew who we were immediately, greeted both of us by name, and welcomed us. It felt almost miraculous. We had a place to be.

Belonging no longer felt possible back in Texas. The state had made it clear that it didn’t want us, didn’t want my daughter to play sports or use the bathroom or see the doctor. The state of Texas, where she had grown up, didn’t want her to exist, as a transgender girl, at all. So we left, leaving behind the people and things we loved. 

At the time of this writing, twenty-six states have passed laws banning best practice health care, which is to say gender-affirming care. Oregon is one of seventeen states to have passed a shield law that protects transgender rights to health care, making it one of the logical destinations for families who need this care. The laws banning best practice health care are part of a broader discriminatory effort to constrain or eliminate the basic rights and freedoms of transgender people to compete in sports, use bathrooms, and designate their gender on official documents such as driver’s licenses. These restrictions affect the social climate where these kids go to school, where they visit the library or the gym, where they play sports, where they live and grow up. Although no organization or agency tracks the number of families who have moved to Oregon to secure necessary health care for their transgender children, nationally more than 130,000 transgender people have fled unwelcoming states in response to hostile legislation. President Trump’s recent executive orders targeting transgender people are already intensifying the fear that suffuses this community. In 2023, journalist Erin Reed wrote, “Should this trend persist, we may witness the largest domestic migration crisis since the Dust Bowl upheaval of the 1940s.”

Our family’s story of trying to figure out when to fight and when to run, how to be brave even when you are not a very brave person, and how to fulfill the unspoken promise we, as parents, make to our children when we have them—that we will keep them safe—is not ours alone. It is not shared often, because it is about things we consider sensitive and private: childhood and family life, health and happiness, politics and religion, and the body. I have sought out others to share the story of our journey with—a clan to rage, grieve, and celebrate with. People who understand. Through a cautious network made up of whispers, direct messages, and personal connections, I have met dozens of families like mine, families who have fled their homes, leaving behind jobs, friends, family members, and dreams in favor of an uncertain future in a new place. 

“I voted. Every election I could vote in, I voted. Since I was eighteen years old,” Julie W. tells me. Julie is forty-eight years old, a born-and-raised Texan. “And I didn’t see a lot of change. It would piss me off so much when people would say, ‘Well, you made your bed, you gotta sleep in it,’” she continues, raising her voice. “I didn’t make this bed. This is not my bed.” Even two years after her move to Portland, her frustration and anger is right at the surface. 

Julie moved to Oregon in the summer of 2022 with her husband of twenty-three years, Peter; her teenage daughter, Kay; and their dog, Nami. (All names have been changed out of concern for the family’s privacy.) Just a few months earlier, Texas’s governor and attorney general had directed the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate—for child abuse—families who sought gender-affirming care for their transgender children. According to Kay, that was the “last straw that told us it was time to leave.” The family made a “safe folder,” a collection of documents from doctors, teachers, and family friends testifying that they were not abusing or neglecting their child, and that in seeking gender-affirming care for their child they were following the best practice guidelines of the most esteemed medical and mental health professionals. That they were good parents.

When Kay thinks back on her parents’ scramble to forestall a potential child custody battle with the state, she recalls, “They never told me to not talk about anything. They just told me to be careful. And I was already only talking about the details of my transition with close friends who I could trust.” Kay’s voice gets quieter. “It was heartbreaking knowing that they were actively doing things to prevent losing me from something that would not be their fault or mine.” 

Julie remembers that time as “very bewildering.” 

“We felt like we had somewhat of a hold on parenting, and then we just suddenly felt like everything was upside down, because you don’t know how to take care of your kid the right way,” she says. “It seemed like every time we would kind of get a foothold, we would get knocked a little bit, and by things that just were not the usual, typical kid stuff. Like, your kid falls down and breaks their wrist is a typical thing, but your governor making an unfair declaration, a government agency to come after you, is not the kind of thing that you can typically expect to be a hurdle in parenting.”

For Julie and her family, the threat of being investigated by Family and Protective Services wasn’t abstract or theoretical. Round Rock School District, where Kay attended school, had been targeted by Moms for Liberty, a radical right-wing group that works at the local level to ban books by and about LGBTQ+ people, secure anti-trans bathroom policies, and force the resignation of teachers and administrators they consider to be “woke alphabet people”—a derogatory term for LGBTQ+ people. When Kay came out as trans at the end of her first year of high school, she felt supported by her teachers and friends, but the school district, under pressure from an extreme right-wing activist group and an aggressive state government, proposed that Kay use a separate bathroom rather than her preferred one, the one the other girls were using. Kay just wanted to use the bathroom like the other kids, who could, she says, just “go into bathrooms and do their bathroom business without being bothered by anyone.” Julie fought for her daughter. She got the ACLU involved, and the school ended up backing the family. They didn’t explain their rationale, which outraged Moms for Liberty. “But,” Julie says with satisfaction, “it really was none of their business.”

In Texas, Kay had close friends and supportive teachers that she could count on. Many were part of her school’s Dragon Band, a competitive marching band of more than three hundred musicians that felt like a family. Despite their victory with the school district, though, the family began to feel like things were not going to be okay. Julie recalls, “We were starting to watch legislation to see, like, what is even going to happen here? Do we need to have an exit plan? And, you know, is this school even going to be a safe place for her?” 

Early that spring the family began scouting new cities for a possible move. When they visited Portland, even though it had recently snowed, everything was in bloom, and it just felt right. Rather than risk having to move partway through Kay’s senior year, they put their Texas home up for sale and moved the day after school let out for the year. 

Making the move to Oregon was not easy. Peter was able to continue to work remotely, but he left behind a huge network of friends. For Julie, moving meant leaving behind her mother, whom she helped care for and who was struggling with Alzheimer’s. “It was something that I had to weigh in my mind,” Julie says, “but my child had to be my main responsibility, and
she wasn’t going to be able to thrive in Texas.” Julie’s mother, who has since passed, “understood that we moved to take care of us…. She loved my child unconditionally.” 

Kay transitioned smoothly into Portland’s Grant High School, which was very welcoming. She was able to keep playing the trombone, but she missed her old marching band and her close friends. She graduated in 2023 and went on to the University of Oregon, where she is a music major and a member of the Ducks’ marching band, which appeared in both the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl this past January.

Shawna and Yvonne were still a fairly new couple when they decided to build a life together in Douglas County, Oregon. They were coming from the Deep South, Yvonne in Mississippi and Shawna in Alabama, and they wanted a place where they and Shawna’s fifteen-year-old transgender daughter, Krista, would thrive. (The family’s names have been changed.) Yvonne recalls, “When I met Shawna, I had already made up my mind that I could not stay in Mississippi. And then I happened to meet this amazing woman. And I’m like, Oh shit, what am I going to do? Because I don’t want to stay here.” 

Yvonne had been looking for a new job out West, and Shawna was open to moving closer to her son, who lives in Junction City. Shortly after they met, in the summer of 2022, Krista came out as trans. Even though Birmingham, where Shawna and Krista lived, is a relatively progressive city, Shawna recalls, “The writing [was] on the wall at that time in Alabama. The political climate, you know, all of these anti-trans bills are starting to be introduced. And Yvonne and I, we’re not ones to scare easily, we don’t buy into the fearmongering. We try to look at facts. You know, we try to have a game plan, not live our lives in fear.” 

But fear for Krista’s well-being did shape Shawna and Yvonne’s decision about where to live. Shawna knew she had to find a way for her daughter to continue receiving the gender-affirming care she needed, even as the state of Alabama tried to rip it away. Krista had struggled with her mental health while coming to terms with her gender identity, but once she could access care, it was as if “a light switch” had been turned on, in Shawna’s words. “This child was so miserable before, and now she’s finding happiness and finding herself and it’s a beautiful thing,” Shawna recalls. Losing Krista’s care, she says, “would probably push her over the edge, and I was not willing to sacrifice my child.” The decision to move was a simple one. Shawna chose her child.

The move itself wasn’t so easy. Yvonne had work lined up in Oregon, but Shawna moved on love and faith. She left behind a rewarding job and colleagues who had supported her through her divorce, her own coming-out process, and her daughter’s transition. Even though they held different religious and political beliefs, they were “like family,” she says. Shawna’s sixteen-year-old dog, Jessie, began the trip but wasn’t able to complete it. They had to say goodbye to her in Mississippi. 

Moving to a conservative town in the Umpqua Valley offered some challenges as well. “I think we were a little bit naive as to what the community and the culture was like,” Yvonne reflects. “For a Southern person, you just know that Oregon is blue. You don’t really understand that the whole state’s not blue…. So that became obvious really quick, that it was a very conservative community here.” She adds, “Once we got here, it was like, you know, we’ve been following the energies. We’ve been going where the universe takes us. And it took us here. And what are we here for? And it just became very, very evident that we are here for change. We are here to educate and make people aware and open eyes.”

Shawna and Yvonne say they are seeing openness and change in their community, but feeling at home and safe looks different for each person. “We have found so much belonging and joy, and we have found ourselves here,” Shawna says. “And that’s still my hope for Krista—that she kind of starts coming into her own…. She’s coming out, little by little, of her shell.”

The Doernbecher Gender Clinic at OHSU is the largest in the state of Oregon, serving about 1,200 patients at different stages in their gender journey. The clinic uses a family systems model of care that aims to engage the whole family in the child’s care, including both physical and mental health. About three years ago, Kara Connelly, a pediatric endocrinologist and medical director of the clinic, and Jess Guerriero, the clinic’s pediatric social worker, began noticing a significant increase in inquiry phone calls from outside of the region. Parents of transgender children were calling to ask about what resources existed, how they might access care, and what a care timeline or wait list might look like if a family were to relocate to Oregon. Where before there might have been four to six of these calls in a year, the clinic now receives around four to six every month—about a tenfold increase. The majority of out-of-state inquiries come from Idaho, the closest state with a ban on care for transgender children, but calls have also come from families in Texas, Iowa, Florida, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

There is no doubt that the wave of anti-trans legislation across the nation has affected wait times at established clinics like Doernbecher, where the current wait to establish care is about eight months. “We want to make sure that we can preserve the quality care that we know that we are providing and not take any shortcuts, but we also want to make sure that we have access for everyone,” says Connelly, reflecting on the challenges of absorbing the increase in patients. “I have a patient who has to move to the East Coast for a parent’s work, and they cannot get into any clinics,” she says, because the wait list there has effectively closed. “It’s just like, all of a sudden, all of these thousands of gender-diverse kids who need this medical care are suddenly forced to be concentrated in these tiny little pockets. It’s just not good care.” 

Connelly says the new laws are causing stress for patients and caregivers alike. “There’s a lot of patients who are on active treatment and are suddenly unable to access the medical care that they need and are running out of refills and really feeling high levels of anxiety,” she says. Guerriero has noted this as well, both among children in her care and their families. “The folks who are coming to Oregon from other states are really political refugees, and we have to think about it in that way, that they’re coming in a state of trauma, whether that’s conscious or not,” they say. “These kids are well aware that their families are having to move, you know, because of them, and yes, there are ways that that can be integrated in a very positive way, but, you know, I think the kids just carry a lot.”

Guerriero is a queer, nonbinary parent, and has a deep, personal understanding of the gender-diverse children they work with. “I came out as queer when I was fifteen, but I didn’t figure out the gender piece until my twenties,” they say. “So seeing these kids and just how well they know themselves and how brave and awesome and creative they are—you know, there’s hope every day. And I think in the current landscape that we exist in, those glimmers of hope are few and far between.”

Tags