The Fascists Want Trans People to Leave. I Left. But Should We All?

A few days ago, Mike Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted a racist diatribe on X offering to pay for “bitching minorities” to move to another country. He also offered to cover their living expenses if they renounced their citizenship and left, which he said that they would need thanks to “that nappy-ass head of hair.”

His rant made me think of a different group of people in the United States, one that would happily take that offer if it meant permanent residency in a country not actively desiring their eradication.

The Trump administration and those in its orbit have made it clear that transgender people need to be eradicated for America to be great again. Trump has effectively promised to eliminate transgender people given the chance. He said on Fox News that if Republicans do not retain control of the House and Senate in the midterms, “transgender will never end.” The implication of course is that if Republicans do retain control, it will end.

Elon Musk has similarly vowed to destroy the community, as vengeance for his estranged transgender daughter, Vivian. “The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” he said. “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that, and we’re making some progress.”

Project 2025 explicitly called for making it illegal to be transgender, or to even discuss being transgender, the First Amendment be damned. In the project’s executive summary, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for the Trump administration declared: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … has no claim to First Amendment protection.… Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

To that end, the Trump administration has pursued a host of policies targeting transgender people as a group. These policies have direct parallels to Nazi Germany’s targeting of Jews, homosexuals, and people with disabilities between 1933 and 1938. For example, transgender people have been banned from the military, banned from access to government health care, banned from public facilities, and banned from all sports, right down to chess tournaments. Similarly, the Supreme Court found that while “gender expression” might be a protected characteristic, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not, meaning that the government can target transgender people for direct discrimination on the flimsiest of excuses.

More recently, the Trump and MAHA-dominated National Institutes of Health published a non–peer reviewed “study” attempting to prove that support for transgender people leads to political violence and terrorism. This follows the September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which named “radical gender ideology” as a domestic terrorism threat indicator. And just to add to the danger, Republican House members Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson have called for all transgender people to be rounded up and forcibly institutionalized.

These calls to label transgender people as violently mentally ill  terrorists is part of a coordinated misinformation campaign, one that has been picked up and amplified by the most prominent “independent” voices in media, such as Joe Rogan, who called transgender people “fucking perverts” and (falsely) accused them of being responsible for most school shootings.

All of this animus is focused on a group of people in grave danger of being targeted and potentially confined by the federal government. This is why the Williams Institute at UCLA found that, given the opportunity in December 2024, 45 percent of transgender people in the United States would leave the country if they could. Almost two years later, with the situation deteriorating even more, it seems likely that this number is significantly higher today. It doesn’t help that Democrats are increasingly willing to sell out their transgender constituents to the people who want to eradicate them in the name of political expediency.

However, the barriers to immigration are formidable. Most countries that have legal protections for transgender people are clamping down on immigration, as xenophobia sweeps the West and buoys fascist movements globally. Similarly, most countries legally define the United States as a “safe” country for LGBT people and therefore are rejecting attempts by transgender Americans to claim asylum. In short: Transgender Americans perceive the danger, even while the rest of the world is too busy dealing with all the other irrational and disruptive things Trump and the GOP are doing to understand the peril that trans people are in.

Here’s an idea: Canada would like to end the trade war with the U.S. without having to effectively hand over sovereignty to Trump. Canada also has a desperate need for skilled young workers, particularly those in medical professions, transport, and to serve in the military.

At the same time, the Trump administration is attempting to separate thousands of qualified transgender members of the military and giving them discharge codes that guarantee they will never be able to work in the defense industry again.

The logic is simple: The United States wants transgender people to go away and would encourage them to emigrate. Canada wants to end the tariff wars, and its ability to take transgender people off the hands of the U.S. government may be a potential bargaining chip. Transgender people can read the writing on the wall: If they don’t flee, something very, very bad is likely to happen to them if the GOP holds onto power.

There is a historical precedent to this concept. During the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazi government actively encouraged to Jews to emigrate. It worked with Jewish organizations to liquidate Jewish assets and transfer the proceeds to them in Palestine as part of the Haavara Agreement. Similarly, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned, they were released on the condition of signing an agreement to emigrate and surrender their property (effectively guaranteeing they would never return).

This sounds horrible, but it is worth remembering that the people who emigrated had a much higher survival rate than those who did not. Roughly 85 percent of the 300,000 Jews who emigrated survived the war. Of the 200,000 who remained behind, approximately 75 percent to 80 percent perished. This is the math that many members of the transgender community are doing now.

However, there are significant issues that would need to be overcome for this concept to be viable. Despite being a lawyer, Davis ignores that you cannot renounce your citizenship if it would leave you stateless. There’s also the issue of whether the Canadian government would trust the U.S. not to renege on any agreement or stiff them on the bill of paying for the living expenses of the people it exiles. Additionally, there is considerable Canadian opposition to increasing immigration of “those people,” which transgender individuals certainly qualify as, even if they do come from a country that’s culturally similar.

As someone who has become a permanent resident of Canada, I can attest to how long and slow the process of naturalization can be. Even for someone with a Canadian spouse and an easy path to permanent residency and citizenzhip, it is a long, drawn-out, and arduous process. Any sort of agreements to help usher transgender people out of the U.S. would face significant administrative, legal, and diplomatic hurdles. But at the same time, all of the stakeholders here have something that the others want, be it skills, an end to the trade war, or a Reich free of Untermenschen.

I have been told many times that it is far nobler to stay and fight than to retreat to relative safety. This argument only makes sense if one believes that there is no real risk of the U.S. government deciding to round up and intern transgender people under the auspices of national security or public health. However, we can clearly see the Trump administration laying the groundwork to do either or both. If our perception of the situation is accurate, then asking trans people to stay and fight makes as much sense as urging German Jews to stay and fight before World War II. Those who fled were able to do far more  damage to fascism in service of the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Canada.

For other transgender people, the idea of spending the rest of their lives going from marginally protected to actively persecuted every four years is unpleasant at best. The courts are setting precedents that allow this targeting, and legal protections via some sort of Equality Act that makes it through a Senate filibuster is unimaginable. People should not have to live in constant fear of their own countrymen electing the next fascist government, which may or may not decide to enact some sort of final solution.

Certainly, there may be great value in staying and fighting if either Republican restraint or the courts would ultimately prevent the right from achieving its goal of “eradicating transgenderism.” But right now, the polling says that probably fewer than half of all transgender people believe that the U.S. is, or will be, a safe place to live anytime soon.