When Is It Time to Flee?

I don’t mean a casual move to another city, I mean actually wrestling with what safety, identity, belonging, and political reality feel like right now.

I’m here in California, feeling both grateful and battered.

Grateful for the community and relative sanctuary.

Battered because it feels like every other week something surfaces that reminds me how precarious things can get for people who are trans and queerness-aligned in this country.

There’s this background hum of cultural shifts and policy noise, and then suddenly something brutal happens and it hits close somehow — emotional landscape and nervous system both are like kites in a windstorm.

Like the shooting in Minneapolis this week, where an ICE agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen — a mother, a poet, someone with a life, kids, a history — during an immigration enforcement operation. The federal government insists it was justified self-defense, even calling her resistant or threatening, but video and local voices strongly challenge that narrative and people are outraged in Minneapolis and beyond. (https://www.kptv.com)

I read these stories and I feel this wave of… what?

Fear? Grief? Rage?

It’s not tidy. It doesn’t come with a label that helps me decide what to do next. But it does make me think: what does it mean to live somewhere where federal agents accidentally — or carelessly — end up killing a person who wasn’t an active threat?

And what does that mean for me — a trans queer person — when the political winds feel like they could so easily lash out at anyone who’s perceived as different or inconvenient?

And then you see headlines about dips in corporate protections for LGBTQ employees, about protests being needed to defend basic rights, about communities saying “enough.” It blurs together and it makes decisions feel heavy. (Advocate.com)

But here’s the weird thing: I can’t just treat this like a binary that has one “right” answer.

Leaving the country won’t automatically bring peace — it just relocates the questions.

Staying doesn’t mean I’m naïve; it means I’m choosing to engage with the world I’ve been living in, imperfect and often painful as it is.

So part of what I’m trying to untangle is this: Is my desire to move driven by avoiding fear or by seeking a feeling of safety and autonomy that’s actually attainable?

Because honestly, sometimes it feels like fear of what might happen is stronger than the evidence of what has happened.

And the difference between the two — fear vs facts — really matters when you’re making decisions that will affect your everyday life.

I remind myself that safety isn’t absolute. It’s relational.

It’s about community support.

It’s about laws on the books and how they’re enforced.

It’s about whether I can sit in a café holding hands with someone I love without thinking it might become an ordeal.

It’s about whether the society around me sees me as a citizen or as a checkbox on a ballot.

That’s not just emotional — it’s pragmatic.

And yet… leaving feels like admitting defeat.

Like giving up on a place that’s also had deep meaning for me and my people.

It feels like saying, “I don’t think this society can care for me,” and I’m not sure I want to make that claim yet.

So I stand in this in-between space.

Not ducking responsibility.

Not panicking.

Just acknowledging that fear exists and that it doesn’t have to be the executive decision-maker. I map what — concretely — would make me feel safer.

Clearer legal protections.
Community networks.
Accessibility of care.
Political representation that sees me and values me.

If that’s absent or eroding, it’s fair to reconsider what feels sustainable here. If it’s present in pockets but shaky, maybe the work is to cultivate and expand those spaces rather than walk away from the whole thing.

I guess what I’m really trying to articulate is this: deciding whether to leave or stay isn’t a single choice with a single answer.

It’s a series of questions about what safety, dignity, and belonging look like each day, and what I’m willing to work toward where I am versus what a new geography might offer.

And while that answer isn’t yet fully formed, I’m learning that it doesn’t have to be instant or dramatic or perfectly reasoned to be valid.

It just has to be honest, and grounded in the reality I live in — fear acknowledged, but not in charge.

And that’s something I can work with.