‘Sexile’ in the United States: Hundreds of transgender Americans seek refuge from Trump in Canada
“In the first 24 hours after Trump’s re-election, we received 1,177 requests for assistance from the United States. Fifty-one percent of these requests were from trans people: 35% from trans women, 16% from trans men,” says Timothy Chan, spokesperson for Rainbow Railroad, an NGO with offices in Canada and the U.S. that helps LGBTQ+ people experiencing persecution and violence start a life in another country. Panicked by a government that threatens their civil rights, many LGBTQ+ Americans, especially trans people, are seeking to immigrate to Canada. Some are even requesting humanitarian asylum. Hannah Kreager, a 22-year-old American, is one of them.
Three months ago, Kreager decided it was time to leave her country. “The [U.S.] federal government is threatening to criminalize trans identities,” she explains. So, in April, she drove 1,000 miles from her hometown of Tucson, Arizona, to Calgary, in the Canadian province of Alberta, where she has lived ever since.
Like her, many American citizens have considered fleeing to their northern neighbor. The avalanche of aid requests received by Rainbow Railroad represents “the largest number received in a single day from a single country,” Chan notes. To put this in perspective, at the height of the Afghanistan crisis (in August 2021), the peak number of daily requests was 119.
