Mark and Jenny were living in Boise, Idaho, when their four-year-old daughter, Fiona, came out as transgender. When Fiona’s teachers announced her new name and pronouns to the preschool, the social fallout was swift and severe.
“I was terrified of the judgment of other parents,” says Jenny. (Her name, along with Mark’s and Fiona’s, has been changed to protect their safety and privacy.) “When they found out our child transitioned, they no longer wanted to speak to us. They would kind of sidle away from us.”
Fiona felt it, too. “She saw her being transgender as this big, horrible secret,” explains Jenny. This lack of community support was painful for the whole family—so much so that they ultimately decided to relocate in search of a more trans-friendly environment.
In addition to the social ostracization faced by families with trans children, anti-trans sentiment across the country is driving legislation that limits access to gender-affirming medical care, which is described by the World Health Organization as, “social, psychological, behavioral, or medical interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.” This includes treatments like hormone therapy, which has been shown to increase social and emotional well-being. The number of bills seeking to prohibit gender-affirming care has surged in recent years, with 188 bills proposed nationwide in the first four months of 2026 alone. Some laws target medical providers, making it illegal to provide gender-affirming care, while others cut off insurance coverage to trans people. As of May 2026, twenty-seven states have banned gender-affirming care for children. In addition to health care bans, numerous other types of anti-trans bills have passed recently, regulating things like gender markers on official documents and dictating which sports teams trans children can join.
Many trans people are now seeking to relocate to states that are more accepting of them. Keira Richards, a trans woman from Denver, Colorado, started to notice an influx of trans people moving to the city in 2023. While much of the rest of the country was passing anti-trans legislation, Colorado was fortifying protections for trans people spanning health care, housing, employment, and education. Trans rights organizations consistently list it among the best states to live in as a trans person, drawing new residents from all over the country.
Courtney Blackmer-Raynolds
Fiona plays on the monkey bars at a local park.
Moving to a new state can be lonely, especially for those who are fleeing discrimination. Keira and her friends created an informal social support network to help trans newcomers in Denver build community. The endeavor quickly grew into something more when Keira and her network began offering trans people financial and logistical assistance to relocate to Colorado. In 2024, Keira formalized this effort into a nonprofit called Trans Continental Pipeline, whose mission is to give all trans people, regardless of their financial situation, the option to leave states with anti-trans culture and legislation.
“We’re reducing the amount of privilege and resources required to be able to get out of those situations,” she says.
Susan Williams from Sioux Falls, South Dakota—one of the states with the most stringent anti-trans laws—says she had never met a transgender person until her son came out as trans when he was in fourth grade. Feeling isolated, Susan set out to find other trans people in their community.
“We started to slowly meet more and more people. And I started a very informal support group in our basement,” Susan explains. “It was, you know, one person, and then a family, and then another one. And after a year, we have, like, fifty people in my basement every time.”
The basement support group grew into The Transformation Project, a nonprofit which seeks to provide resources and community to transgender people throughout South Dakota and the surrounding region.
It feels like “constantly watching your back,” says Diana, a friend of Susan’s from those Sioux Falls basement meetups and the mother of a trans child in middle school. She and her son asked to be identified by pseudonyms for safety and privacy reasons. Diana describes raising a trans child in South Dakota as “worrying that something bad is going to happen and worrying that the wrong person will find out that our kid is trans and make life a living hell.”
Diana’s son, Derek, doesn’t want people in Sioux Falls to know that he is trans. “I don’t know if he’s doing that because he knows it’s unsafe to do so, or if he feels ashamed about it,” she says.
Susan says that many trans South Dakotans feel like they have to keep their identity hidden to protect their own safety, all the while struggling to meet basic needs like health care.
Diana’s family drives four hours from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis, Minnesota, for Derek’s twice-yearly in-person medical appointments. For additional telehealth appointments, which happen two or three times a year, the family drives thirty minutes across the state border so that they can legally join the appointment from their car. Their doctor in Minneapolis recently stopped providing him gender-affirming care due to mounting political pressures, despite it still being legal in the state.
Diana says that legislators “want to make it as hard as possible for trans people to live in society.” For many families, traveling out of state for medical care is extremely difficult due to the high cost of travel, lack of access to transportation, inadequate child care, and parents’ work responsibilities, among other challenges.
Limiting trans youth’s access to gender-affirming care can have a profoundly negative impact on their mental health. The risk of transgender and nonbinary youth dying by suicide is 72 percent higher in states that have passed anti-trans legislation including bans on gender-affirming care, according to The Trevor Project. As Asher McMaher, the executive director of Trans Up Front IL, a Chicago-based organization that helps people travel to Illinois to access gender-affirming care, explains: “It’s devastating to be told that who you are and what you need to live your authentic life is not allowed. It’s an extreme loss.”
In addition to the mental health risks of health care bans, some recent bills increase trans youth’s vulnerability at school. In 2023, Idaho lawmakers passed a bill mandating that students use the bathroom that corresponds with their sex assigned at birth. The bill allows parents to sue schools for $5,000 each time their child shares a bathroom with a trans child. After the bathroom bill passed, Jenny and Mark resolved to leave Idaho as quickly as possible.
“It felt like they were putting a bounty on our kid’s head,” Jenny says. “That was the breaking point. This is too unsafe. Somebody is going to beat her up in the bathroom.”
Courtney Blackmer-Raynolds
A pride flag flies at a home in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Mark and Jenny scrambled to move their family before Fiona started first grade three months later. They considered various states with legal protections for trans people and eventually settled on Fort Collins, Colorado, because of its moderate size, college town culture, proximity to a big city, and good public schools. They sold their Boise house and bought a new one in Fort Collins, sight unseen. Jenny switched to a contracting role with her same company, while Mark found a new job in the medical field. It happened fast, and initially Mark had reservations.
“Is this the right thing?” he remembers asking himself. “I really loved Boise . . . . I mean, we spent fifteen years there. It’s our home. It’s pulling up roots.” But he knew they had to relocate to protect their daughter. Mark, Jenny, and their two children loaded up the U-Haul and hit the road.
The family was fortunate, though, to have been in a financial and professional position to make the move on such short notice. Moving to Colorado is a financial challenge for many people. States that have the most protections for trans folks, like Colorado, tend to have a higher cost of living than states without those protections. Trans Continental Pipeline offers one month of free housing to help people get on their feet and sponsors a network for finding roommates. Keira has found that some people come without any plan for housing and end up needing to stay in a shelter. “There’s one queer-affirming shelter in Denver and they have fifty beds,” she says. “You’ve got to call in at 10 a.m. every day to see if you get one. It’s a gamble.”
For other trans people, it’s just not feasible to move. To support individuals who can’t relocate, Trans Continental Pipeline connects them with trans rights organizations in their area. “If folks can find these communities that will be accepting of them,” Keira says, “then that will still do wonders for their quality of life even if they can’t get across the country.”
The Transformation Project aims to make South Dakota safer and more welcoming for the trans people who stay, either by choice or necessity. Their programs include a referral list for trans-friendly professional services (including dentists, hair stylists, and lawyers), a trans-specific clothing boutique, support groups, and grants for traveling to access gender-affirming care.
“Our focus is to make it safe for those who want to stay and for those who have to stay,” says Susan, who is now the organization’s executive director. “We’re really working to make South Dakota a place that people don’t feel like they need to leave.”
For those who can leave, like Diana and her family, moving presents the opportunity for easier access to gender-affirming care and a culture that is more accepting of LGBTQ+ people. When Diana’s family visited Boulder, Colorado, to scope out a potential new home, they found a trans-friendly atmosphere. Diana remembers crying tears of relief when she saw someone wearing a shirt that said “Protect Trans Folks.”
“It was an environment that’s just so proud of their queerness,” she says. The family was sold; they plan to move to Colorado later this year. “I feel like in Colorado . . . they will go to bat for their queer neighbors, and I just want that for my kid.”
For Mark and Jenny, living in a more accepting part of the country has been a big relief. The couple now organizes a social support group for trans kids and their parents.
“We landed in Colorado and we relaxed. We felt supported. We felt affirmed. We started becoming more open,” says Mark. Jenny adds, “It’s really great to not feel so alone and to also be able to welcome new families.”
Though Mark and Jenny feel much safer in Colorado, they still can’t completely let their guard down. They have opted to not tell the school district that Fiona is trans to protect her against discrimination should state laws change in the future. Diana describes it this way: “When you have a trans kid, you’re always a little bit guarded because you never know who’s a safe person and who’s not.”
Mark, Jenny, and Diana have upended their lives to shield their children from discrimination. “This is the United States. This is supposed to be where you’re free and we are not free,” Diana says. “Our kids are not free.”
Like other people who have relocated to escape anti-trans legislation, Mark considers his family to be “refugees.”
Keira from Trans Continental Pipeline agrees. “If a refugee is essentially a person fleeing the discrimination of their government, these folks are refugees,” she says. “These folks are in a bad situation that they didn’t ask for and they’re trying to find a better life. It’s a pretty fundamental American story.”
Keira hopes that one day people will no longer need to flee anti-trans legislation. “My absolute end goal for the organization is to become obsolete,” she says.
But for now, organizations like Trans Continental Pipeline are very much in demand. “The need,” she says, “is constantly outpacing what we can create.”