In quiet search of freedom
I didn’t find myself in a very celebratory mood this Pride month. Honestly, I am exhausted. I know I am not alone.
For a variety of reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of introspection lately, trying to connect with my younger self. When I look back at the version of me from a decade ago, the me in June of 2016, sometimes it feels so hard to reach her. She lived in Brooklyn, in a world where Hillary was going to win, and marriage equality had just passed the year before.
There was a presumption of an invisible hand guiding our community toward equality. We knew that the arc of history, however long, would bend toward justice. Right?
And now?
The me of today just isn’t so sure anymore. Did the arc of history just get longer? Or is it gone? Because what all of the letters of our LGBTQ+ alphabet mafia have been faced with is backward motion, oppression, danger and erasure.
I had naively planned on becoming part of a new, privileged generation of elders, one layer removed from the deep struggle of what came before. Instead, we have found ourselves joining our elders in the very tangible and explicit fight for our right to exist at all.
By the end of June, I realized I didn't actually want to write a Pride post.
July has always been the month where America talks about freedom. As more and more folks consider international relocation as an alternative to life in the United States, I've been thinking a lot about what freedom actually looks like.
This last year, I got to see a kind of freedom up close that I really need to talk about.
It isn't loud. It doesn't wave a flag. Most people will never know these people exist.
The heroes I want to celebrate this July are the parents of trans kids.
I started Rainbow Relocation Strategies to empower queer folks and their families to take advantage of the global lifestyle. Go out, see the world, learn languages, gain international skills and connections, and build the kind of life usually reserved for the wealthy elite. Living abroad allowed me to consistently fail upward into a life I couldn't have imagined as a child. I wanted other students to study abroad, queer folks ready to retire to find a safe place to do so, and people in the middle of their careers to move somewhere where health insurance wasn't tied to their job. Plus, it was a really fun way to spend my days, helping queer people build exciting new lives.
Slowly throughout the summer of 2024, and then like an absolute flood once the dust settled on November 6th, everything changed.
The volume of inquiries increased ten, twenty, thirty-fold. The conversation completely flipped. Calls weren't about opportunity anymore. They weren't about adventure or finally chasing a dream.People no longer felt pulled abroad.They felt pushed. The fear and anxiety was so deep because it came from every direction, and because it all felt so orchestrated.
International relocation is about inspiration anymore, but rather just tactics. We're over here doing two-tier math. Tier one: here's what Get-The-F**k-Out strategies could work quickly. Tier two: here's how to work toward more permanent residency and citizenship.
We are constantly keeping up with new threats around IDs, passports, ICE arrests, trans rights, marriage equality, and how all of this pushes people closer to their own personal red line.
The work has also looked like getting WhatsApp messages in the middle of the night from trans folks I have never met, who are abroad on vacation or scouting, suddenly terrified to come home, asking me whether it's safe to come back through customs. I’m half asleep, unsure, and feeling unequipped to make such a decision. I want to say, let's talk in the morning. But their flight leaves in a few hours. I want to give them a straight answer. But then I realize that I don't even know if they're real.
I don't know one hundred percent that they're not someone untrustworthy. A bad actor. A bot. A journalist looking for a new angle of click bait. I don't know how to know who to trust anymore.
We've had relatively neutral press from places like Rolling Stone, Oprah Daily and Der Spiegel. But what if tomorrow a right-wing publication decides we're the next story? Suddenly I'm spiraling, feeling guilty, scared, and like I'm never doing enough.
My health suffered immensely. The exhaustion eventually became a major health issue that I'll now live with for the rest of my life.
And then, almost immediately, I remember that if I think I'm stressed, imagine what my clients must be feeling. Especially my trans clients. Especially the parents of trans kids. I know how worried they are because I now work almost exclusively with those folks, even though, up until 2025, maybe five to ten percent of my clients were trans or non-binary. Now roughly seventy-five percent of my clients are trans, non-binary, and overwhelmingly, parents of trans kids looking for safety abroad.
I thought I was going to spend my career helping queer people build adventurous lives around the world. Instead, I had a front-row seat to something I wasn't expecting.
I met my heroes.
And so, rather than growing a business, I have gone relatively silent so as not to draw too much attention. The parents of trans kids that I work with have been stealth, escaping, rearranging their entire lives while everyone around them asks, Are you sure you have to do this? Don't you think you're overreacting?
Overreacting.
Hospital records are being subpoenaed. No one knows what may eventually be criminalized. Their beautiful, unique, precious kids have somehow become the focus of grown adults and government systems that have decided they are a threat. These are parents who have created safe spaces. The safest bubbles they possibly can. They let their genderqueer kids stay almost oblivious to the outside world, protecting them from the constant noise while quietly carrying every fear themselves.
Where they couldn't shield them, they've already moved from red states to blue ones, selling what they thought were forever homes and leaving generations of family behind, only to land somewhere with no real guarantee that today's safety won't become tomorrow's uncertainty.
I've worked with families who have split themselves in two, one parent leaving for another country with their trans child while the other stays behind with the rest of the family because there was simply no other choice.
I've worked with chronically ill single parents who somehow found the strength to move with multiple children to countries where they don’t even speak the language.
Families are moving to countries sight unseen. Some invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into residency programs because they have the means. Others retire years earlier than they planned, on impossibly tight budgets, because it's the only visa they can qualify for. Others leave successful careers behind to become entrepreneurs at fifty years old, opening bakeries or online businesses they never imagined running.
Every one of them is making impossible decisions.
And the part I want to shout the loudest from the rooftops? These are parents just like me. People somehow frame them as ‘activists’ to create distance themselves and ‘ordinary’ parents. But these ARE ordinary parents forced into an extraordinary situation. These are parents who would find a tutor if their kid needed extra help. The kind who spend hours researching schools. The kind who lose sleep trying to solve whatever problem is standing in front of their child. Thoughtful. Funny. Educated. Organized. Completely exhausted. Protective. Deeply, fiercely protective.
And these are the people our country has decided are dangerous?
These are the families we're supposed to be afraid of?
Their children are the threat?
I still can't make those pieces fit together.
What I find, call after call after call, are some of the kindest, most generous, most earnest people I have ever met.
People who simply believe their children. People who listen. Many of them were straight and not even a part of the community before having their queer kiddos. Then, their children told them who they were, and they had the head and the heart to listen, and to allow space for it, to believe them, and to support them.
That shouldn't sound extraordinary. But right now, somehow, it is.
The more time I spend with these families, the more I find myself thinking these are the parents so many queer people wish we had had. So many of us know what it feels like to have someone cry for the wrong reasons when we came out. To be told we were confused. Broken. Embarrassing. To have family members quietly disappear. To lose people we thought would always choose us.
Then suddenly I found myself sitting across from parents who were choosing their children over everything - over career, forever homes, retirement plans, certainty. I saw myself in them far more than I ever expected. We were just parents, sitting across from each other, on a zoom call, figuring out the next right step to keep their kids safe. And maybe that's what affected me so profoundly. Not just the injustice these families are facing, although that is impossible to ignore.
It was watching ordinary people respond to extraordinary cruelty with extraordinary love.
Quietly. Without asking to be celebrated. Without thinking of themselves as brave. Just doing the next thing their child needed, doing it under incredible duress, with nothing certain, making rational decisions in the midst of total and complete chaos. I
I don't know if history will ever fully understand what is happening right now. This movement is too quiet. Families aren't marching, they're packing, they're selling houses, applying for visas, enrolling children in new schools, saying goodbye to grandparents, learning new languages, rebuilding entire lives so their children can simply grow up.
There won't be monuments for this.
No one will ever know exactly how many families quietly crossed borders, how many careers were left behind, how many marriages stretched across continents for a while, or how many children slept peacefully because someone made an impossible decision on their behalf.
The impact of this moment may always be impossible to measure. It will live scattered across classrooms in Portugal, playgrounds in New Zealand, apartments in Spain, neighborhoods in Canada, and countless places where children get to become themselves a little more freely than they could have before.
This year, I just couldn't quite write a Pride post.
Instead, on the first day of the month where we talk so much about freedom, I wanted to talk about the people who have shown me what freedom actually looks like.
Parents who quietly give up everything they thought their lives were going to be so their children have the freedom to become exactly who they already are.
These are my heroes.
This is what freedom looks like.
