Why I Am Leaving the USA

My family is fleeing the country.

We are not doing this in a panic; this is an orderly retreat from an unwinnable situation. We are slowly but surely packing up and emptying out our house. Instead of planning summer vacation and planting flowers, we’re tackling a mountain of overdue home repairs, painting, carpeting, and deep cleaning. The house we loved, and hoped to spend our lives in, needs to look its best so that we can sell it for someone else to enjoy. 

Allow me to introduce myself, albeit anonymously. I have spent my academic and professional career studying and forecasting democratic decline, fascism, and genocide. I’m also transgender. My heart wants to stay; it aches when I watch my kids pick through beloved childhood belongings, trying not to cry as they decide what will come with them to our smaller future home. My head, however, knows that it is time to leave. Especially given the bleak future we all face if we stay.

This decision is a result of both my professional analysis of the situation, as well as my own uniquely personal reasons. But I have spent the better part of a decade war-gaming out what is happening to our government, and here are the over-arching motivations spurring our move:

• Successful consolidation of power by the autocrat
• Failure of opposition to coalesce
• There is little hope of meaningful recovery
• Destruction of government capability


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• A significant risk of genocide aimed at transgender people
• I personally can do far more to fight this outside the US than inside

I will cover each of these in turn.

Successful Consolidation of Power

The Trump administration has largely consolidated all governmental power within the White House and DOGE. Congress has yielded the power of the purse to Trump and DOGE and will not attempt to resist his usurpation of their vital power to allocate funds. Congressional budgets have become effectively advisory in nature, with the Executive Branch holding veto power over any payments made by the government.

The other constitutional check on presidential power should be the courts, but they are teetering. The Trump administration is playing all sorts of legal games, comprehensively obstructing judges’ attempts to deal with the deportations, attacks on birthright citizenship, denial of funds to USAID and other departments, and moves to allow Trump to remain for third term. Top people in the Executive Branch, including Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Elon Musk, are calling on the administration to simply ignore the laundry list of injunctions, stays, restraining orders, and adverse judgments that courts have made against Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional acts. Multiple analyses say that if he does so—and if the DOJ, FBI, and U.S. Marshals refuse to carry out court orders—the judicial branch becomes powerless. 

It is only a matter of time before Trump and Elon take this next step. Once they have consolidated their power at the federal level, and once their regime is secure enough that public outrage cannot threaten it, they will be free to defy the courts as much as they want. I give it less than six months before we reach that point.

Trump has replaced almost everyone at the Department of Justice, FBI, U.S. Marshals, and other organizations who would be responsible for carrying out court orders. The leadership he’s installed will follow orders from the White House rather than from the courts. Anyone who does grow a spine will be instantly fired and replaced with a loyalist. For the most part, rank-and-file employees within these agencies are terrified of losing their jobs and will do whatever it takes to hang on.

Trump’s own party, which controls both the House and Senate, is too terrified of him and his base to put up any kind of resistance. They will go along with whatever he says, no matter how contradictory or ludicrous his statements. Zelenskyy is the enemy. Tariffs are a tax cut. There are five lights. Canada was always our enemy. They demonstrate truly Orwellian levels of obeisance to whatever random lie supports the administration’s goals. More crucially, one third of the population believes every lie, one third is too ignorant to tell the difference between truth and lies, and the remaining third is powerless (or unwilling) to do anything about it.

Finally, in an echo of May 1, 1933 when Hitler banned unions in Germany, Trump issued an executive order on March 27, 2025 to effectively neuter unions for government workers by declaring that almost every governmental position is related to national defense, thereby preventing them from engaging in collective bargaining. Not coincidentally, however, his administration excluded police from this executive order. Regardless, both moves were meant to cut off unions as a potential barrier to the ambitions of the regime. 

Which brings me to my point about opposition failing to coalesce.

Failure of Opposition to Coalesce

If there was a moment when we could prevent a descent into autocracy, it has probably passed. Trump has consolidated almost all power at the top, and almost every potential source of resistance has chosen to give in rather than to fight.

Blue states might have had a chance to band together and refuse to accept the lawlessness and autocratic aims of the Trump administration, but that opportunity was lost. California Governor Newsom has decided that his best course of action is to cozy up to the fascists and announce to the world that he’s willing to help them target the minority they blame for everything. California was the lynchpin to any state-based resistance to a tyrannical federal government targeting its own citizens; but its leadership obeyed in advance, to preserve their state budget. Trump has used the threat of federal funding cuts to successfully cow most state governors, and without California, there simply isn’t the critical mass needed for states to mount a successful resistance of the autocratic attempt.

Similarly, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has decided that on a strategy of “do nothing and wait until Trump becomes so unpopular that he loses the next election.” Which, ironically enough, was the exact strategy employed by Germany’s primary opposition party (the Social Democratic Party, or SPD) when Hitler came to power in 1933. It failed miserably, of course, because there wasn’t another free and fair election in (West) Germany until 1946. Even then, the SPD still lost to the Zentrum (Center) Party. 

Despite his Jewish heritage, Schumer seems to have learned nothing from his own history. The assumption that the U.S. will have free and fair elections once Trump has full control over all three branches of government is questionable at best. He will have neutralized the courts by the mid-terms if he feels it is necessary (which he may not, given that he’s already taken the power of the purse). The idea that there will be a free and fair 2028 Presidential Election, where his power is directly threatened, seems highly unlikely after four full years of power consolidation and weak Democratic leadership.

Large-scale protests have failed to materialize. Even if they had, protests rarely have an impact unless they threaten regime survival; and for that to happen, the police or military must side with the protesters. Trump’s gutting of military leadership within the JAG corps ensures that they will sign off on any war crimes committed, including massacring protesters. If you think police will side with protesters, you can stop reading here; we’re not operating in the same reality.

There was an outside chance the military might stand up to the new regime. But Trump successfully gutted leadership (particularly the top Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyers) and installed completely unqualified cronies in all top positions. The military has complied, even going along with commands that have direct analogs to what happened in Germany in 1934 and 1935. According to a high-level source in the Pentagon, “All them (Generals) are terrified that if they say no, they’ll get a blindfold and a cigarette.” They mean this literally: After the threats made against retired General and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, military leadership is afraid they’ll face a firing squad for treason if they resist.

There Is Little Hope of Meaningful Recovery

Corporations, law firms, the media, and universities are all obeying in advance. Employees and students are being silenced. Any mention of transgender people is being eliminated. Media is using the phrase “Gulf of America” to retain access to the White House. Despite the devastating cuts to research, many scientific organizations are fighting to see who can obey the hardest, loudest, and most visibly. Trump and MAGA have successfully intimidated most institutions into compliance, and those that offer even token resistance (e.g. the Associated Press) are cut off.

At the same time, the collapse of traditional media, the social media ecosystem, and Americans being largely unable to discern truth from fiction has rendered reality incapable of changing their minds. These organizations that supposedly promote “neutrality” or impartiality have fallen into a trap. Daniel Okrent, journalist and inventor of fantasy baseball, also summarized this concept in what became known as Okrent’s Law: “The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.” Similarly, Norman Ornstein observed, “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” Thus, you cannot mobilize a public that cannot widely recognize reality anymore and simply accepts the apathetic Russian attitude of “nothing is true, and everything is possible.”

Considering all of this, I do not see a plausible path back to the America we once had. The Trump administration remains several steps ahead of anyone that offers even minor resistance. As they consolidate power, their ability to punish anyone who steps out of line grows, as do the penalties they can impose, tightening the spiral of intimidation and obedience. Historically, even unpopular dictators who ruin their countries tend to hang on to power indefinitely: Cuba, Venezuela, Belarus, Russia, Hungary, Georgia, Turkmenistan, North Korea, are all examples where strong men seized power and never let go. Even after their deaths, the movements they created survived, and their societies remained undemocratic. 

Such is it likely to be with Trump: at this point he seems almost a figurehead to be used by his party to take power and never let go. He seems only vaguely cognizant of things happening within his administration and spends his time playing golf or signing executive orders with increasingly radical language put in front of him. He may be in his late 70s, but even his passing of natural causes is unlikely to loosen the grip of fascism on the United States.

The odds that we can vote our way out of this in four years seems implausible as well. In competitive autocracies (like ours is becoming), elections are used as a popular anesthetic. If you give people the false hope that they can change things at the ballot box, they won’t rise up. They live in a perpetual state of hoping “maybe next time.”  The GOP learned this from Hungary, where Orban’s Fidez party continually employs this trick. So do the autocratic regimes in Venezuela, Belarus, and elsewhere: Election wins are rigged, but seem just close enough to keep people from revolting.

Destruction of Government Capability and Quality of Life

One of the hallmarks of this administration is its drive to destroy the government’s ability to provide essential goods and services. There are many explanations offered for why they are dismantling the US government: tech-bro libertarian small government ideals, incompetence, genuine desire to cut costs (without understanding that they’re kicking down Chesterton’s Fence, a desire to privatize the entire system a la the Russian oligarchy of the 1990s, or some combination thereof.  In the end, though, the reasons don’t matter; what does matter is that life in the United States is about to change greatly for the worse and won’t be recovering any time soon.

Food won’t be safe, as the USDA and FDA stop inspecting and certifying the safety of foods and drugs. Pollution will increase along with associated illnesses, as the EPA is gutted and shut down. Deregulation of nuclear materials increases the odds of eventual radiological disaster. The destruction of the Department of Education and preference for private religious schools means my queer kid with an IEP can’t get a decent education. The VA doesn’t serve trans people anymore, and even if they did their capabilities are being stripped. Social Security is being gutted, meaning that I have no assurance of a retirement income. Medicare and Medicaid are being stripped of employees and funding, meaning less access to health care for seniors and the poor. Plagues like polio, measles, mumps, and rubella are going to come roaring back under the inept, unscientific, conspiracy-theory driven leadership of RFK Jr. I expect we will see a drop in life expectancy similar to the one observed in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

At the same time, federal funds will be siphoned to cronies like Musk, much in the same way that Hungary’s autocrat Orban rewarded political loyalty. As a result, Hungary is one of the poorest countries in Europe. The destruction of research funding will also eventually grind U.S. economic development to a halt just as it did in Hungary, as top scientists and intellectuals depart for countries where their research will be funded. Seventy-five percent of U.S. scientists polled say they are looking to leave the U.S., most for Europe or Canada. This is a “brain drain” of unprecedented proportions, and it will cripple U.S. innovation.

The worst of it all is that these capabilities, built over decades, cannot be easily regained or recreated once lost. It is much easier to destroy than create. All of the experts, scientists, academics, intellectuals, and experienced public servants you fire today will move on with their lives. Many may be living in other countries. If by some miracle sanity is restored to the United States four years from now, all of these people will be gone, their offices and research equipment liquidated, and even their data on servers deleted.

What rational person would upend their lives to take a job where they risk losing everything—again—if the U.S. public loses its collective mind and elects another corrupt fascist? The answer is obvious: no intelligent person will do that if they have any other choice. Only desperate people with little experience will be trying to get a foot in the door.

In short, the U.S. is becoming a place no one would want to live in unless they had to, and a place they certainly wouldn’t want to move back to. It is unlikely that we will be able to elect someone willing to try to fix the problems we are creating now. Even if we did, the people needed to do the fixing will all be long gone, leaving far less qualified individuals to tackle the monumental effort. America will be a country where quality of life, quantity of life, and economic opportunity is crippled for decades, and probably the rest of our working lives. On top of that, retirement is likely to mean poverty, disease, and death due to the collapse of services to seniors.

Any person who understands what’s coming and has the ability to leave, would be wise to do so.

Extreme Risk of Transgender Genocide

This topic could fill an entire book by itself, but the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) is everything I know about the history of genocide and of the Holocaust points to this regime attempting some form of genocide against the trans community. People who disagree either rely on American exceptionalism (“It can’t happen here” or “Americans wouldn’t stand for it”) or insist that the courts won’t allow it, which makes the unlikely assumption Trump won’t simply ignore the courts.

There are very strong parallels between the legal and social assaults that Jewish people experienced during the run up to the Holocaust, and the actions that the Heritage Foundation and Musk have called for against transgender people. Trump’s own campaign website more or less directly stated how they intend to carry out the removal of transgender people from public life and into federal custody.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I will lay out the most important things that I am seeing that have convinced me that genocide is not only possible, but a deliberate end-state goal.

Back in August of 2016 I created a list of 19 ways that the Nazis pushed Jews out of society between 1933 and 1939, paving the way for the “Final Solution.”  They banned Jewish people from schools and universities, from the civil service, and from the media. They made it illegal for them to participate in sports, kicked them out of the military, and denied them state funded health care. They weren’t allowed to vote, their rights were considered less important than those of other Germans, and they were forced to have passports that identified them as undesirables. The list goes on. 

By my count, Republicans today are attempting to achieve all 19 of these effects but attacking trans people instead. Given the differences in legal systems and government, the methods not identical, but the effects have direct parallels. This is another paper in and of itself, but the long and short of it is that trans people are being systematically cut off from society and civil rights in almost all of the same ways Jews were. The main difference is that the Nazis took six years to achieve these effects, while the GOP is speed-running their way to it in six months.

During the 2024 Election, Trump ran the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” more than any other political advertisement. It basically told people, “Don’t vote for Harris because she is supported by trans people.” Which is the same message Hitler ran on in 1932. The poster below says: “We vote Hindenburg! We vote Hitler! Look at these faces and you know where you belong!” 

On top of that, trans people are about .5% of the population, the same percentage as the Jewish population in pre-1933 Germany. This puts them in the political genocide “butter zone”: a small group that society is aware of as different, that can be blamed for everything, and whose eradication won’t cripple the economy. Both trans and Jewish people fit Umberto Eco’s description of a convenient enemy for fascist movements: 

“The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies… Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

The opening executive summary of Project 2025 explicitly stated that being transgender should be illegal, stating:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

The message is clear: Transgender people are inherently pornographic, their existence is not protected by the constitution, they should be outlawed, and perhaps even registered as sex offenders. 

The architects of Project 2025 are everywhere within the administration and have largely succeeded in implementing other Project 2025 policies aimed at eliminating transgender people from various parts of society (e.g. removing all reference to trans people in federal documents, creating federal bathroom bans, revoking accurate passports, banning them from the military, etc.). It seems only a matter of time before they begin actively pursuing their explicitly described end state.

Trump’s Agenda 47 campaign website contained two interlinked promises that, when put together, spelled out the mechanism by which a final solution to the transgender question could be implemented. Agenda 47’s section “Ten Principles For Great Schools Leading To Great Jobs” states that, “President Trump will direct the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to convene an independent outside panel to investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and ideology increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression, and violence.” The section titled “Ending the Nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicts, and Dangerously Deranged” states that, “And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”

The inference is a straight line: Transgender people are dangerously mentally ill, and the dangerously mentally il will be involuntarily committed. One can only presume these institutions to rehabilitate transgender people will focus on forcibly detransitioning trans people by any means necessary. Those who have undergone “bottom surgery” stand a high risk of being tagged as irredeemable. From a practical standpoint, there is no difference between this and reeducation camps.

Trump isn’t the only one bringing up “wellness farms” as a solution to “mental illness.” RFK Jr. has proposed putting people in work camps for up to five years where they would be “denied their prescription medications.” They would also be barred from having cell phones, computers, or other means to contact the outside world. They would be put to work full-time, presumably for little or no pay, growing organic food. He claims this process would “reparent” supposedly broken people, again framing mental health issues as not a medical issue, but a personal failure. Though typically referencing anti-depressants or ADHD medications, it’s not much of a stretch to apply the same “cure” to transgender people taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

RFK’s rhetoric about autistic people has a particularly fascist, genocidal flavor as well. Autism, he said, “destroys” families; today’s autistic children “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” This view of autism reflect not only stereotypes from 40 years ago, but also thinking that people with autism are “useless eaters” or lebensunwertes leben (life unworthy of life). Given his approach to ADD, ADHD, and depression (camps), I fear that some form of Aktion T4 is on the table. This is only exacerbated by the announcement that a national database of people diagnosed with autism is being developed by NHS.

All three of our children have either been diagnosed with either ADD or autism. They’re great kids, good students, and have big plans for their lives. We cannot live in a country where that future might be behind barbed wire, or worse if we choose to stay. At the same time, it is easy to see how this line of thinking, and policy, will bleed over onto transgender people as well. Almost as a bonus, Elon Musk bears a deep personal hatred of transgender people because he had a child (Vivian) who was assigned male at birth but now identifies as female and is very much alive today. Musk published the following on X: 

There is no question that Musk is referring to transgender people here. He is vowing that they will die, and he will lead the charge. The richest man in the world, and arguably the most powerful man in America, has made a personal pledge to eradicate transgender people. This is not a statement taken out of context, or a thing said in jest. Musk intends to use every bit of his power to eradicate transgender people from public life. His words should be taken as seriously as they would if he had said, “Now Judaism will die.” This is an extremely serious threat, and one that is already being carried through by the administration.

Musk and DOGE’s unfettered access to federal databases offers a near foolproof way to identify transgender people. Attached to everyone’s social security account is a marker that indicates their status with selective service. Unlike most gender markers, this one cannot be changed via any administrative process and is exclusively for people assigned male at birth. If other documents indicate a different gender or sex than their selective service SSA marker, they can be flagged as transgender. This is likely how the State Department is identifying transgender people applying for their first passport after having successfully changed their birth certificates and social security gender markers, along with their state driver’s licenses. There is nothing in any of their documentation identifying them as their sex assigned at birth, except the selective service SSA marker.

And Elon Musk has full access to the SSA database. Maya Angelou once wrote that “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Musk has clearly stated who he is and what he intends, and he has the power to begin carrying it out. It is a terrible risk to remain in the US when people who want you dead have such power.

The Department of Justice has put in writing that it sees there being too many transgender people, and that it is a legitimate function of the government to minimize the number of transgender people in the U.S. The minimum is zero, and it is the explicit policy of the DoJ that they will send people to prison for decades to achieve this goal, in the name of protecting women, children, and American values. In other words, they are openly saying they want us gone, and will use the full power of government to achieve this end.

All of this together paints a bleak picture. Trump campaigned on harming trans people in exactly the way that Hitler campaigned on harming Jews. The Heritage Foundation laid out a plan to legally marginalize and isolate transgender people in the same ways that the Nazis legally isolated and marginalized Jews. Trump’s administration is already carrying through with policies that closely mirror anti-Jewish Nazi policies in the 1933-1939 period. Elon Musk, the monetary power behind Trump and second most powerful man in government (and arguably the most, given he controls treasury payments now as a de facto exchequer) has vowed to use all his power to eradicate trans people.

And yet, no political opponents seem to have put this together. Or, if they have, they’ve made the conscious decision to side with the administration on transgender people because they see it as a losing issue politically. Other countries are not lining up to take trans people as asylum seekers or refugees; if anything, many countries are shifting right and making it harder to get in. 

This brings me to the central lesson of survival learned from the Holocaust: the ones who got out as early as possible were most likely to live. The further they got away from Germany, the more likely they were to survive. In most cases, that meant putting an ocean between themselves and the people driving them out. This is why Albert Einstein was already in the US by December 1932, even though he was considered an alarmist at the time.

Similarly, some of my most educated trans friends and allies are also preparing to leave. An Ivy League educated lawyer is abandoning their high-paying corporate job and fleeing to Europe. A family who used to be a prominent advocate for their transgender daughter picked up and left for the EU as well. Others who have written about theocracy and democratic decline have told me they too are getting ready to go (though they are not quite as far along as I am). And just to top it off, the two people who have offered material support to help get us out are Jewish colleagues whose grandparents survived the Holocaust by the skins of their teeth.

In short, the people who KNOW are all saying the same thing: get out, while you can, because there’s no guarantee the doors will remain open much longer.

At the beginning, the Nazis encouraged Jews to leave, and even worked with Jewish organizations to help them liquidate assets (for a fee) and move to Palestine. Over time, getting out became progressively harder: not just because of the Nazis, but because foreign governments (particularly the U.S. and U.K.) cut off immigration for desperate Jewish refugees, whom they saw as undesirable. The tale of the SS Saint Louis is a case in point. 

A logical analysis of the situation yields only one conclusion: they intend to eradicate transgender people, they are already taking the steps necessary to do so, they have a plan for a final solution, and the only way it won’t happen is if they do an about-face and decide not to go through with it. Given the gleeful cruelty of this White House and its supporters, that’s a terrible bet. More likely than not, the current MAGA base would laugh and revel in photos of trans people having their heads shaved, having involuntary surgeries performed upon them, being correctively raped, and being forced to do manual labor until they die. For all these reasons, I deem that there is little chance they will not choose to pursue a final solution to the transgender issue all the way to the end they have already promised.

For myself, and for my family, the risk is too great. I cannot hope to fight this. Transgender people cannot hope to fight this when we have already been abandoned by the only forces that might stand up for us: namely the Democratic Party, state governors, and the military. The courts will not protect us if things continue as I expect. The only legal options are to flee, or to risk eradication at the hands of our government.

I Can Do More Elsewhere

You might wonder why I am writing this anonymously. The short answer is that freedom of speech in the United States is already dead; if you haven’t noticed this yet it’s because it hasn’t affected you personally. The Trump administration has made it clear to companies with federal contracts that if any of their employees say anything bad about the administration, those companies will lose said contracts. These companies are obeying in advance by informing their employees that their continued employment is contingent on remaining entirely silent or saying only nice things publicly about the regime. This degree of separation allows the administration to shut down most political speech in the U.S. that they don’t like because they aren’t directly muzzling peoples’ freedom of speech.

I used to be a prominent writer, but when the Freedom Caucus gave this exact ultimatum to my employer a while ago, I had to disappear off the literary grid. As a person who is former military, I’m also being threatened with being recalled to active duty and court-martialed if I say anything publicly. 

All of this begs the question: If I cannot speak up against my government without losing my job, if I cannot protest without being court-martialed, if I’m likely to end up in a camp, if the government cannot be changed by anything I can do here, what value is there in remaining in the U.S.? Conversely, will I be of greater value to my community, democracy, and the world if I once again have a voice? If I can freely able to lobby other governments to recognize the reality of the situation and persuade them to open their doors to Americans fleeing not just tyranny and poor living conditions, but conditions ripe for genocide? What if I can be the person to alert the world to real risk that this does turn into a genocide? 

If I am elsewhere, I have the ability to more effectively warn other democracies about the militaristic dangers the Trump administration poses. He is not joking about military action in Mexico, seizing the Panama Canal, or annexing Greenland and Canada. I keep coming back to analogies to Germany, but we are genuinely witnessing Lebensraum and potential Anschluss in Canada.

There is a long history of dissidents leaving their home country to continue their work and accomplish more than if they stayed. Thomas Mann left in 1933 and ended up in the US by 1938. Hannah Arendt also left in 1933, which is why we have “On Totalitarianism” rather than her mostly forgotten name on a list of arrivals at Auschwitz. Today, the top scholars on fascism are also fleeing for freer pastures. Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have left tenured positions at Ivy League Universities to lecture on fascism and democratic decline at the University of Toronto. In personal correspondence, one assured me that I was making the correct decision.

Morally, I struggle to find justification for remaining in the U.S. The greatest power I have is in my writing and analysis. While I remain here, I have no voice. I have no institutional power and don’t have enough money to make any sort of difference. All I can do here is hide in a hole and hope they don’t come for me, which I fully understand is likely to happen, and they will absolutely find me if they decide to. I cannot help myself, or anyone else by remaining here, any more than a Jewish person could hope to affect the situation by remaining in Germany.

I believe the highest commandment for the transgender community now is to survive. That’s looking increasingly unlikely inside the United States. I’m not trying to sow panic; rather, I’m trying to give people the best analysis I can offer after several decades of studying the subject. After a decade of following events in the U.S. closely, the parallels to the rise of other genocidal fascist regimes are too clear to ignore. 

Very rarely has a country that has descended this far into autocracy recovered without outside intervention (like, say, the combined allied armies fighting all the way to your capitol). Most warning signs of impending genocide are here. I know I’m a pessimist. But, as Jewish producer Billy Wilder once said in 1945, “The optimists all died in the gas chambers. The pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.” This brutal observation reveals a truth: when it comes to the threat of genocide, listen to the intellectuals … and the pessimists.

I understand that I can escape far more easily than most. I get that other people have fewer resources. I know that rules for navigation are difficult. I know that some people feel morally obligated to stick it out and fight to the bitter end, whatever that means to them. What I am saying is that if you are a transgender person who has the opportunity and the option of getting out, then for your own safety, you should.

My decision is not meant to panic others. I am laying out the facts as I see them to help my readers make an educated choice about how much they are willing to sacrifice to get away from what is happening here. It’s a horrible decision reluctantly made. I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t thoroughly convinced that I can accomplish nothing by staying, the risk of genocide is extreme, and that I can serve some greater purpose elsewhere. I make this decision with sadness and trepidation: I am saying a final goodbye to my country and what is left of my family.

But, my country left me well before I left it. After 32 years of service, I now fear it more than anything else. I am reminded of the words of Scipio Africanus, the successful Roman general who left Rome after politics turned against him. He said before his death, “Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis,” or “Ungrateful country, you shall not even have my bones.” He was buried in Liternum, not Rome, as a final act of defiance.

I believe this too will be my epitaph.