Kai Shappley misses so many things about Texas: her friends, the H-E-B supermarket chain, country music. She misses Tex-Mex cuisine and her chickens and the stray cats she fed in her neighborhood. She misses being in the place where she was born, feeling the roots of her family and her life grow around her. The 12-year-old now calls herself a Texan living in Connecticut (where, she says, “the people are as cold as the weather”).
Kai and her family left Texas in 2022, after Kai’s testimony against a Texas bill that could have sent parents to prison for providing gender-affirming care for their children went viral. Though the bill didn’t pass, Republican governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to conduct child abuse investigations of parents. That was when Kai’s mother, Kimberly, noticed her hair had started falling out from the stress.
Trans people are under attack by politicians looking to ban their access to hormones and gender-affirming care, limit the bathrooms they can use, and investigate their parents for supporting them in their identity. According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, 561 anti-trans bills have been introduced this year, making 2023 a record year for legislation targeting trans people.
Because laws vary greatly from state to state, some trans kids and their families are uprooting their lives and moving, in hopes they’ll be more protected in their adopted state. Legally, Connecticut is a safer state than Texas for trans kids, but it’s not perfect. Kai says she was faced with transphobic bullying at her new school, to the point that she’s now being homeschooled. She doesn’t really have the option to be “stealth,” she adds, using a word to describe a trans person who passes as cisgender.
Being stealth for Kai would mean she could pass as a cisgender girl at school without her peers knowing she’s trans. But “there’s no part of me that wants to be stealth,” she tells Teen Vogue. She has been an activist for much of her young life. Search her name and you’ll find viral videos of her that have millions of views, a book she co-wrote about a trans cheerleader living in Texas, and an extensive social media footprint. She doesn’t regret any of it.
Says Kimberly, chiming in, “[I want] her to be stealth. I want it to be easy, and it’s not.” That’s the thing, she points out, about moving to a “safe state” — transphobia isn’t limited by geography: “It was shocking to us how, even in a liberal state, there are only certain safe bubbles for trans people. You’re not safe in the whole state just because they vote blue. You move to a safe state, where you have protections, but your [people] still hate you.”
Still, the Shappleys have hope — “Not much,” Kai says, “but there’s some” — that living in Connecticut could get better for them. Mostly, though, they hope the family will one day be able to return to Texas, that the state will turn blue or the federal government will pass protections for trans people, enabling them to go home.
In the meantime, they’ll try to find a way to live in the Northeast, and Kimberly will make sure she has everything lined up in case her family needs to flee farther next time — not to another state, but another country. “I started checking into things in New Zealand,” she says. “That looks really promising. I don’t know. I’m waiting for a safe country to say, ‘We are a safe country and we welcome American refugees.’”
Devin Myers, 22, did not plan on leaving Florida before finishing her college degree. She loved her school, Florida A&M, and was proud to attend an HBCU (a historically Black college or university). But she reached her breaking point while reporting for a college class on an anti-trans bathroom bill that Politico reported would “make it a misdemeanor trespassing offense for someone to use bathrooms [in state and local government buildings, schools, colleges, and detention centers] that don’t align with their sex at birth.”
Myers, a trans woman, remembers looking around and thinking, What if I have to go to the bathroom while I’m at the Florida State Capitol? “Let’s say I go to the bathroom and I end up there with the Capitol Police and these people that are writing laws against me,” Myers says. “There’s anxiety that comes with just going to any bathroom in Florida [and] being trans. It’s terrifying.”
Myers was on track to graduate in spring 2024, but she left Florida with one year left to finish her degree. She moved to Brooklyn, where she says she feels it is safer for her to simply exist and she has a community of queer people who understand her struggle.
But that doesn’t mean it was easy to leave Florida. “I’m definitely mourning,” Myers says. “There’s a lot of goodness in Florida, a lot of good people and good communities. I don’t want to forget about that in having left.” Now she’s settling into life in New York, trying to figure out the best way to finish her degree, with dreams of becoming a sports journalist. “I’m switching to online school and kind of praying.”
Skyler Morrison, 15, was nine years old when her parents told her they were leaving Texas in search of a safer state for her to be a trans kid. She had been involved in state-level activism, speaking out against Texas bathroom bills; but when more people in the community became aware of her activism, the bullying got bad. A former friend threatened Skyler with physical violence. Someone they knew said his kids couldn’t play with her anymore.
The family moved to Arizona, where Skyler’s mother, Chelsea, says they feel a “breath of safety” with Democratic governor Katie Hobbs signing executive orders to protect the queer community and continuously vetoing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Skyler has taken to life in Arizona, where she loves the desert landscape, camping, and visiting Sedona.
But she misses the friends and family she had to leave behind in Texas. It’s traumatic, Skyler says, to be forced out of your home: “No kid should be forced to leave the place where they grew up because of some stupid laws.”
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