Trans people in the United States are being asked to choose between safety and belonging, and there is no clean answer. Leaving can mean survival. Staying can mean resistance. Both choices carry a cost, and a country that forces that calculation on any group of its people has already done something very serious indeed.

What is actually happening in the United States right now

The New Republic piece that prompted this is worth reading slowly, because it names things plainly that a lot of coverage skirts around. The Trump administration has banned trans people from the military, from government healthcare, from public facilities, from sports. A non-peer-reviewed publication from the National Institutes of Health has tried to link support for trans people to political violence. A presidential memorandum named "radical gender ideology" as a domestic terrorism indicator. Two Republican members of Congress have called for trans people to be forcibly institutionalised.

These are not policy disagreements. They are not culture war skirmishes. They are coordinated steps towards the removal of a group of people from public life. The article draws the parallel to Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1938 explicitly, and I think it is right to do so. The parallel is not hyperbole. It is history, applied carefully to a pattern that historians recognise.

And then there is what Elon Musk said about his estranged daughter Vivian, that she was "killed by the woke mind virus", and that he vowed to destroy that virus. His daughter is alive. She is trans. He is describing her existence as something he intends to destroy. I keep coming back to that, because it tells you something about the emotional engine underneath all of this. It is not ideology. It is a very personal kind of grief turned into a very public kind of cruelty, and trans people across an entire country are paying for it.

The calculation people are doing

A Williams Institute survey found that 45 per cent of trans people in the United States said they would leave the country if they could. That figure is from December 2024. With everything that has happened since, the number is almost certainly higher now.

The article's author has left. They are now a permanent resident of Canada, and they write honestly about how long and difficult that process is, and about the very real barriers: most countries with legal protections for trans people are tightening immigration, most legally classify the United States as a safe country for LGBT people and are therefore rejecting asylum claims, and significant parts of every receiving country's population do not want more immigration of "those people".

None of that is comfortable to read. It is also all true.

The historical parallel the article uses is the Haavara Agreement, under which the Nazi government worked with Jewish organisations to allow emigration in exchange for surrendering assets. Roughly 85 per cent of the 300,000 Jews who emigrated survived the war. Of the 200,000 who remained, approximately 75 to 80 per cent perished. The author is not invoking this to be dramatic. They are invoking it because trans people are doing exactly this maths, in real time, in 2026, and the world is largely too distracted by everything else the current administration is doing to notice.

What it costs to leave

Too much of the conversation treats leaving as simply a practical question, a visa route, a job offer, a language barrier, but it is not only that. Leaving means leaving. It means leaving your community, your family, your city, the street you grew up on, the friends who know you, the version of yourself that belongs somewhere specific. It means leaving the country that is yours, that you were born into and built a life inside, and doing so because that country has decided it does not want you.

That is a loss. It should be named as one, not wrapped in the language of adventure or fresh starts. Some people will leave and find something genuinely better. Some will carry the grief of it for the rest of their lives. Both things can be true of the same person.

What it costs to stay

Staying is not free either. Staying means living under a government that has named you a threat, that is actively working to remove you from public life, that has allies calling for your forced institutionalisation. It means watching your healthcare options narrow, watching your legal protections be stripped away one by one, watching politicians who once claimed to support you decide that you are too expensive a constituency to defend.

It means doing all of that while also, somehow, getting on with your life. Going to work. Loving people. Being ordinary. Which trans people do, every day, because they are human beings living human lives, not symbols in somebody else's political project.

Some people stay because they cannot leave. Some because they refuse to be driven out. Some because their family is there, or their community, or their healthcare, or the particular version of themselves that only exists in that place. These are all legitimate reasons. Staying is not passivity. For many people, it is the hardest thing they could possibly do.

The question nobody should have to answer

What I keep coming back to is this: the existence of this question is itself the problem. A democratic country is not supposed to make its citizens choose between safety and home. A government is not supposed to make belonging conditional on identity. The fact that trans people in the United States are doing survival calculations, comparing emigration statistics from 1930s Germany to their own situation in 2026, is a catastrophic failure. Not of trans people. Of the country that has put them there.

Should trans Americans leave? I cannot answer that for anyone. What I can say is that leaving to survive is not surrender, and staying to resist is not foolishness, and every trans person making this decision deserves to make it with full information, real support, and without anyone telling them that the correct answer is obvious. It is not obvious. It is one of the hardest questions a person can face.

What I hope, more than anything, is that the people asking it know they are not asking it alone.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.