I’ve agonized over this decision since the election as I’ve invested quite a bit of myself into building a safe and supportive community for non-cis folk here in Houston since the 1990s. And yet, here it is: I’m moving out of Texas.

I’m the one who convinced the head of Texas DPS policy, Rebecca Blewitt, to officially allow trans people to change their name and gender on Texas ID back in the 90s. I started TFA, and it was TFA training –and then paying the Montrose Clinic (now known as Legacy Health) 75 bucks a person to see a trans person– that affirming care came to Houston. It was TFA running its own shelter that homeless services came to the South from trans folk. It was because we fought with Covenant House for TEN YEARS that they began serving trans and intersex youth.

We ran the Monday night meetings (HTGA) for decades and HTGA is where the International Transgender Law Conference, put together and run by Phyllis Frye, got its start and Houston’s first trans center also got its start. Once the center behind Susan Anderson Properties shut down, we opened center space at Houston Area Community Services, first in the Heights, and then in Montrose. We moved the center to 713 Fargo, and then to 604 Pacific.

Before there was Facebook, I put together TransHouston.com with not the greatest code, bubblegum, and every spare minute of my time. It had all the features of Facebook (media streaming, friends, groups, forums, personal blogging, chat, photo sharing, private messaging, etc.), before Facebook was a thing. The site was ad-free, didn’t track your data, and didn’t cost anything.

And probably closest to my heart is the Trans Archive, which began as my personal collection of trans history. A friend of a friend gave me her collection of trans magazines going back to the 1960s. After that, I poured my meager 5k savings into expanding the collection and donated it all to TFA to get the archive off the ground. For years, I invested every spare dime I had into building that collection, trying to ensure that it was representative of every non-cis experience the world over, throughout history. Along the way, I secured funding to expand the collection’s library and as it grew, other folks donated their art, books, magazines, and papers, too.

I believe that the archive’s collection made the trans center home. The center was anything but clinical; instead, it was set up like a home and decorated with our own history. From Lily Elbe’s hand-painting that hung over the fireplace to the African statuary, the stories represented in the space represented our stories. It was tangible evidence that we had always been there, and no matter what, we endured.

After a trans woman had been raped, her rapist sending her gloating text messages about how he’d not only raped her, but given her HIV, she requested that I test her for HIV. She chose the archive room to be tested in. It was in that room that she learned that she was, in fact, HIV positive, and it was in that room that we made a police report.

It was in that space that a trans woman, having just been beaten for the ‘crime’ of walking down the street, asked me to hug her as she wept, eventually agreeing to make a police report if the police were willing to come to the center and if I was there as the cops interviewed her.

This and 1000 other interactions, both small and large, became community. Many volunteers staffed the center, ran the groups, and planned and ran the events. We banded together when things went wrong and celebrated when things went right.

In 2014, the center closed, and I had to devote myself to caring for a grandmother who had dementia after the family member who had been caring for her declared he couldn’t do it and moved away. So, Alexis and Robin helped me maintain my sanity during this time by keeping groups and events going while being a driving force behind keeping the TransAdvocate.com –articles and podcast– going. Together, we ran the Trans Disaster Relief Fund (during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey) and other projects. My weekly coffee sessions with Alexis kept me, if not sane, something approaching it; caring for an elder with dementia is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Then, towards the end of her life, I got to be there with my grandmother as she took her last breath, holding her hand, while telling her how much she was loved. After, I began my PhD program, moved to Galveston, and began working for a small social service agency.

And now, I’m moving away, or perhaps more aptly put, evacuating.

My heart is both heavy and empty; this move is bittersweet. As excited as I am about moving forward, I am sad about losing my community to the petty cruelty of an evil that we’ve not seen for a century. While it was hard being trans in Texas during the 1980s, 90s, and forward, there is only one example where a political party was explicitly organized around the notion of eradicating non-cis existence in society, and that was Nazi Germany.

At a state and national level, the House and Senate are controlled by the party that explicitly states it will revoke my ability to function in society. Likewise, the state and national Executive and Supreme Court offices have fallen to this same trans derangement syndrome that is now a central organizing theme of the whole of the Right.

I don’t think that everyone has yet recognized how dangerous this moment is, and I don’t mean to be a pessimist or a doomer. I want to be realistic, and reality is not what people seem to want to hear. The central organizing ideology of the party that controls all levels of power in Texas, Congress, the Whitehouse, and SCOTUS is the eradication of trans people from society. Giving false hope to people in a situation like this is, I think, cruel. This is akin to a disaster situation, and people must act accordingly. In the same way, we cannot “fight” or “organize” our way out of a Cat 5 hurricane; we cannot stop what is about to happen. In disaster situations, people evacuate and focus on surviving the emergency and, afterward, rebuilding. For those who must ride out the storm, some significant portion will die, and the survivors will carry the psychological scars of this emergency for the rest of their lives. This is the material reality defining all non-cis people in Texas, regardless of how hopeful, faithful, or positive someone wants to be.

I think families of trans and intersex kids need to know that they have very little time before the state moves to break up their families and torture their kids. Wishing and hoping this isn’t the reality they’re faced with is to facilitate that eventuality. The bills, policy, and MAGA enthusiasm for eradicating non-cis existence via de facto and de jure methods has not been seen since the Nazis. Denial is not going to help anyone survive. Their goal is the total eradication of non-cis people from society. While MAGA (probably) won’t go as far as to strip people of their citizenship for being trans, they will strip you of your legal identity, making it impossible to function in society so that, essentially, you will survive using the same strategies undocumented immigrants use to navigate life.

Evacuating allows me to work and finish my doctoral degree without a political party playing games with my license for the crime of existing. Since the 1990s, I have invested just about everything I am into the trans community. When I had to begin caring for a grandmother with dementia, I poured even more of myself into being there for her, and as much survivor guilt I feel in this moment, I also feel an immense sense of gratitude for all the amazing lives I’ve gotten the opportunity to interact with over the past few decades of Houston-style trans activism.