I don't want to leave

but I may not have a choice

Apparently this Irish estate was once owned by my great-great-grand-uncle, so perhaps I can move in and claim squatter’s rights

I’ve been avoiding writing this newsletter for same reason I once used to avoid writing about being trans, because there’s a part of me that knows as soon as I’ve put it down in writing, all my attempts at denial are going to fly out the window. Writing about something forces you to face it head-on, and I don’t want to give these current fears of mine any substance. But I’m trying to focus on drafting a novel, and every morning when I sit down at my desk I have to fight through this fear first, and it’s exhausting, and bad for my writing practice, so I’ve just got to bite the proverbial bullet and get it down on paper.

A few months ago I read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, and recognized my own denial in the form of the female protagonist, a mother who is bound by force of nature to her daily routine, who is still doing the laundry and buying groceries and making cups of tea as the world around her collapses. She can see what’s happening, but doesn’t want to accept a reality that is so wildly inconsistent with the future she’s planned. And so she stays, when she should leave. The end of the book is shocking, but its message is crystal clear: don’t be the frog that stays in the boiling pot.

The reality that I don’t want to face is that being trans may soon become incompatible with living in America.

I understand why people stay, why people won’t leave their homes even as the waters rise, or the forest fire approaches, or the tornado turns in their direction. This is the country where my kids are, my friends, my community, my work, my publisher, my agent, my pets, my home. I still have a British passport, but the life I’ve built for myself over the last eighteen years is here, and I don’t want to leave. It’s like that point at the end of a romantic relationship when you can see where it’s all heading, and it’s not good, but you can’t accept that the life you’ve built together might be over. You can’t quite bear to let the dream go.

I hoped for a while that Trump didn’t actually care about trans people, that we were merely a useful way to discredit the “radical left” in the run-up to the election. Once this tactic had served its purpose, I hoped he’d leave us alone. This is the sort of naïveté I can’t afford to indulge in anymore. Trump is set on destroying everyone he dislikes, and we are an easier target than most. He doesn’t even have to ban gender affirming care outright, he merely has to terrify the medical providers into not providing it anymore. If there are no providers, nobody will be able to transition, so trans people will be faced with two choices: detransition or leave.

If that happens, what will become of the trans community? Will it scatter? Vanish? What will happen to those who can’t leave? Would it be morally and ethically reprehensible for me to leave, knowing that I’m one of the few who can? What if I made the decision to stay, and faced the consequences along with everyone else? Would that be courage or madness? I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.

And yet I may be forced out. I am a naturalized citizen—which makes me less vulnerable than someone with a visa, but more vulnerable than someone who was born here—and if my identity becomes illegal then I don’t think my citizenship will count for much. The Trump administration is trying to make it a state felony to commit “gender identity fraud” by making a “false or misleading verbal or written statement” about one’s sex, which would instantly render me a criminal if I identified as anything other than female on any legal document. Given that I identify as male on all my legal documents—drivers license, passport, social security, bank account, health insurance, will—this would screw me overnight.

The government is also doing its best to make it impossible for trans people (both children and adults) to legally access gender affirming care, by asserting that use of cross-sex hormones is in violation of the FDCA. So far this tactic has been overturned by the courts, but the government doesn’t need court approval when they can use intimidation. Dozens of gender-affirming providers have already paused or shuttered their services from fear of potential financial or legal consequences, and this is only going to get worse over the next few years. I can’t risk obtaining hormones on the black market—because with an identity as vulnerable as mine in a country with a judicial system as broken as ours, engaging in any sort of criminal activity right now would be madness—and I know I wouldn’t survive detransition. So if my existence becomes criminal by its very nature, I will have to leave.

Then there’s the growing specter of political violence. We’ve been dealing with the backlash against the trans community for years, but in recent weeks it’s taken a very dark turn. Every time there’s a mass shooting the Right tries to pin it on the “trans death cult” and now the legacy media is following suit: after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the only motive the New York Times singled out in the shooter was a commitment to “trans rights,” despite the trans person in question having had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting. In a country with easy access to guns and a large militia already primed to see trans people as a threat, every time someone shines this kind of spotlight on us we become less safe. Should I even be mentioning Charlie Kirk in a newsletter? How can I write anything if it might result in my house being doxxed? I have children living at home! But once the fear creeps into my writing, then it’s my career on the line too, a career already destabilized by Trump’s attacks on educational institutions, DEI programs and arts grants.

And if all this wasn’t enough, Erin Reed reported in her newsletter yesterday that two sitting members of Congress have now called for the institutionalization of trans people. South Carolina representative Nancy Mace called us Trannies—as she always does—and stated that “these people are violently ill and should be in a straight jacket with a hard steel lock on it.” When Texas representative Ronny Jackson was asked whether “bringing back mental institutions could be on the table,” he responded by saying that transgender people have “legitimate psychiatric issues… we have to do something about this, we have to treat these people, we have to get them off the streets and we have to get them off the internet and we can’t let them communicate with one another. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus. This is a cancer that is spreading across this country.”

So if I can’t live safely or write freely in the United States, how can I stay? And yet if I had to leave, where would I go? I have dual citizenship, but England isn’t much better. JK and her cronies have effectively made us second class citizens over there, and reports of 150,000 almost entirely white and predominantly male British Nationalists taking to the streets in London last weekend don’t exactly inspire confidence. Leading UK trans writer and journalist Shon Faye revealed the levels of despondency across the pond by suggesting that the trans rights movement is over. “The fallout from [the assassination of Charlie Kirk] has shown plainly that the trans rights movement in the West, at least the liberal program of legal reform and cultural representation pursued for the past decade, is as dead as Kirk,” she wrote. “I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime.”

If this all sounds grim, it’s because it is grim. It’s hard to find a good spin on any of it, and I’m not going to try. At a reading with my editor Roxane Gay last year, someone asked me about the future of trans rights, and I said I believed things would get better. Roxane gave me a side-eye and said, “That’s very optimistic of you.” She was right, of course, I just didn’t know at the time quite how bad it was going to get.

But if there’s one thing I can cling to, it’s that I’m hardwired for optimism. I’m also monogamous by nature, and I made a commitment to this country—and all the queer people in it—that I refuse to break, whether I honor it from the US or in a long-distance relationship from a place of exile. To quote me quoting The Princess Bride in my memoir, we are in The Pit of Despair right now, and I’m not going to keep pretending otherwise. But while I’m preparing for the worst, I’m still hoping for the best, and as long as there’s a vial of testosterone left in my bathroom cabinet, I’ll be down here in the muck with my friends, looking for a way to climb back out again.

Sending love to all the trans folk out there, especially the kids,

Oliver

I’d like to keep these posts free for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work as a writer, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or buy a copy of my memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—which is out now in paperback with Roxane Gay Books in the US and Grove Press in the UK. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; Humorous and heartwarming — LA Review of Books; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein