Although many different people are invited to attend, it’s important to Essence that her parties remain Black, queer and trans at their core – things that she says were once integral to both house music, which was born in Chicago, and her city’s nightlife writ large. “Something I’ve learned from the community built by my chosen elders is that if everyone looks like you, it’s not house,” she says. “I needed something to be run by Black trans women. The dolls used to be in the DJ booth with these straight guys back in the 80s and 90s but it’s not that way any more.”
These patterns of displacement and cultural erasure mirror those playing out on the national stage, where once-condemned calls for ‘transgenderism’ to be ‘eradicated from public life’ have become normalised. Nine states, from Alabama to North Carolina, have passed laws censoring discussion of trans subject matter in the classroom. School boards across the country have instituted policies that forcibly out trans students to their parents, increasing their already elevated risk of homelessness, violence and suicidality. Entire families have uprooted their lives to protect their trans children, fleeing laws that ban their kids’ access to healthcare. And this anti-trans backlash, so swift and alarming as to make the ‘transgender tipping point’ of the past decade feel like some kind of fever dream, is itself happening in tandem with a broader reactionary shift in American civil life, one so powerful that not even something as seemingly queer as Village People are immune to it. The group, who found fame in the 1970s with a bunch of indisputably gay songs about Fire Island, San Francisco and cruising hotspots like the YMCA, jumped to perform at the nation’s capital for Trump’s inauguration, along with less surprising names like Billy Ray Cyrus, Kid Rock and Carrie Underwood.
In the face of this targeted political violence, many trans Americans have been forced to tap into previously untapped stores of resilience in order to survive. This is doubly true of those younger trans Americans – the teenagers and young adults we might lump together under the banner of Gen Z – whose economic stability, housing security and bodily autonomy may be more at risk than that of their older counterparts. Survival in this moment can take many forms. (Going stealth is definitely ‘in’ for 2025, and understandably so.) But for some, like Essence, this moment inspires nothing short of resistance. “We had a party scheduled right after the election in November,” she tells me. “It was such a dark time, but we played American hardcore techno and wore red, white and blue to show these radical Christian nationalists who the fuck we are. We wanted them to know they can’t just take over these spaces because we own this. This is ours.”
Every trans person I know is just trying to make it through the day safely and mind their own business
In 24 states, it is illegal to provide gender-affirming healthcare of any kind – hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers, surgery – to minors. The parallels with the ongoing criminalisation of abortion access, another matter of bodily autonomy impacted by sex-based oppression, are clear, though it should be noted how often the very same lawmakers behind such campaigns will then turn around and ban trans students from participating in school athletics on the grounds that they’re invested in protecting women and girls. Speaking of which, 25 states have banned trans-inclusive athletics in schools. Two states, Utah and Florida, force public school students to use bathrooms and other gendered facilities in accordance with their sex assigned at birth, and two more states, South Dakota and Missouri, explicitly prohibit schools from adding trans-inclusive protections to their non-discrimination policies.
The difficulties don’t end, of course, once trans adolescents grow up. The policies in 10 different states, including Ohio and Arizona, specifically exclude gender-affirming healthcare from Medicaid coverage – an especially grievous affront, given that research shows trans Americans are disproportionately more likely to experience financial hardship. Conversion therapy is still legal in 18 states at present, the ‘trans panic’ defence remains permissible in court in 30 states, and state law prohibits residents from updating gender markers on their drivers’ licences in Kansas, Tennessee, Florida and Texas.
“It is decidedly grim and hostile,” says Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights-focused non-profit that has posed a number of legal challenges to this wave of legislative attacks. “It’s hard to wear rose-coloured glasses while doing this work. It’s hard to draw historical corollaries that are identical to the present, but I think it’s akin to the anti-feminist backlash of the 70s and 80s when a lot of cultural and social progress was pushed back by the right – sometimes by the very same people and organisations that are doing it again today.”
Perhaps the greatest legal battle currently underway is that of United States v Skrmetti, a landmark case in which the Supreme Court is examining the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on trans healthcare for minors. Given the court’s conservative bent and the somewhat recent Dobbs v Jackson ruling, which overturned Roe v Wade and revoked the federal right to abortion, the decision, expected this June – just in time for Pride – may not be a welcome one.
For Branstetter, however, there is hope that the justices will not only decide that these healthcare bans are unconstitutional but that they will render a decision that gives the ACLU a legal precedent that it can then use to challenge similar bans nationwide.
When I ask her what the worst-case outcome of the case would be, her answer takes me aback.
“If we lose Skrmetti, then the worst-case scenario would be that things stay the same,” she says.
“You mean that we’re living in the worst-case scenario?” I ask.
Yes, she says. “For a lot of these families, the world has already ended.”
Kay Poyer wants to make one thing clear: “Texas is one of the most transgender places I’ve ever been.” It’s a Friday night in January when I reach Poyer by phone. The 24-year-old writer and internet personality, known on social media as @ladymisskay, was called “the oracle of TikTok” by The Face for her mix of no-bullshit wisdom and cleverly worded takes, phrased and delivered in a style all her own. While her home state has long been the birthplace of a lot of right-wing mess, she grows irritated when people from other parts of the country stereotype the Lone Star State in such reductive terms.
“People forget that Texas is very queer and very Black and very Latino,” she says. “So, so, so many other minority groups have huge fucking communities down here.” The state is large, she continues – larger even than France, for those unfamiliar – with progressive, multicultural bubbles scattered throughout its sea of red. “There are so many counties that are just mostly empty, and then there are all the mostly white farm towns. It’s complicated. There are a lot of contradictions down here, and it’s important for people to know that when they talk about what’s going on.”
Doctors are afraid to continue providing care because they’re afraid of getting targeted
Even the trans community around Dallas, where Poyer lives, is hard to pin down. “It’s made up of a lot of different pockets,” she explains. “There’s the underground rave scene, which has a lot of nonbinary people in it. A lot of our nightlife is still pretty – this may be a heavy word, but – segregated in a way. We’ve got a ballroom scene that a lot of the Black trans girls here are a part of. It’s a big scene – a very, very big scene.” Ironically, she tells me, you probably won’t find many trans folk out in the city’s gaybourhood, except on particular nights. “My usual spot is a goth club. You get some real freaks in there. A lot of people go in bondage gear on S&M nights, a lot of genuinely alternative people, and a lot of trans girls. I still don’t really know what the connection is. I just love going there. They play a lot of darkwave, post-punk. It’s one of the few clubs I’ve found where people actually get into it on the dancefloor, so it’s become my favourite hangout.”
Three hours southwest of Dallas lies Austin, the capital of Texas, where state lawmakers have been working overtime to make life harder for not only their trans constituents but their families and doctors as well. In 2022, Governor Greg Abbott issued a letter to the Department of Family and Protective Services, directing it to investigate the families of trans children on the grounds that supporting their kid was tantamount to “child abuse”. This had a chilling effect on advocacy, says Branstetter. “Before that, we had a pretty broad network of families speaking out publicly, showing up at rallies outside the State House and at court hearings and school board meetings,” she says. “It’s obviously such a terrifying prospect, to have your kid removed from you, put into foster care and detransitioned against their will.”
Along with going silent, some families have left the state. Those who’ve stayed have been subject to an endless wave of attacks from their lawmakers, including a restriction on accessing gender-affirming care for those under the age of 18, which went into effect in 2023. Though the ban specifically bars access for minors, trans adults have also been impacted, says Landon Richie, 22, a Houston native and longtime activist who works as a policy coordinator for the Transgender Education Network of Texas (Tent). “Even with the ban on youth care alone, doctors who had been providing care to both minors and adults, or even just adults, are now afraid to continue providing that care within the scope of the law because they’re afraid of getting targeted next,” he explains. “People’s lives are just being played with in every which way, and it is forcing people to flee the state, if they can afford to do so.”
“I really tend to stay away from the whole panic of, ‘They’re gonna fucking round us up!’ but it’s clear that the intention is to make it incredibly hard for us to live here,” says Poyer. Though she says she personally doesn’t have a hard time walking around Dallas, she’s quick to note that her experience as a white trans woman is materially different from that of the Black trans women she knows. (In addition to increased rates of discrimination and harassment, a number of Black trans women have been killed in Dallas in recent years, including LaKendra Andrews in 2023, Tiffany Thomas in 2021 and Muhlaysia Booker in 2019.) But even though Poyer can navigate Dallas with relative ease, she and her boyfriend have been thinking about leaving Texas, perhaps moving to a coastal city or maybe Chicago, where she knows a lot of girls through social media – and they’re not the only ones. “All of us down here are working our shit-ass jobs trying to save up the money to get out,” she says.
As half of the US has moved towards making younger trans people’s lives worse, much of the other half has done quite the opposite. For nearly every state that censors discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom, there is another that requires their inclusion in school curricula under state law. Twenty-six states may have restricted trans teenagers’ access to gender-affirming care, but 14 others, including Colorado, Minnesota, California and New Mexico, have in recent years passed ‘shield’ laws in order to shore up access to such care. New York, another state with such legislation in place, went a step further in last November’s election, with New Yorkers voting to amend the state’s constitution to add additional protections for both trans healthcare and abortion.
As a result, many trans Americans, including adolescents and young adults, have been flocking to these states in the hope they will offer a better quality of life. Trans people moving somewhere new to escape violence and repression isn’t a new dynamic, of course; laws against cross-dressing were “a central component of urban life from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th”, as the sociologist Claire Sears writes in Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in 19th-Century San Francisco. But there is a noticeable escalation of ‘medical refugees’ – as I’ve heard a friend who works in trans services refer to those who’ve fled their home state to seek gender-affirming care – that has followed this latest wave of anti-trans legislation.
“We’ve absolutely seen an increase in people coming from other states – from Pennsylvania, from the south, from Ohio and from Florida especially,” says Rocky Halpern, interim coordinator of transgender services at the Ali Forney Center in New York City, which provides housing and other services to queer and trans teens and young adults. “We have a group of trans girls who grew up together in Florida. They left to come here together so they could transition and build a new family. It’s all really increased over the last couple of years, and I suspect we will see a further increase of that as we enter another Trump era.”
We wore red, white and blue to show these radical Christian nationalists who the fuck we are
That said, legislative protections might be no match for corporate cowardice. Within days of Trump signing an executive order restricting minors’ access to gender-affirming care, NYU Langone Health, a leading New York City hospital system at the forefront of transgender medicine, cancelled at least two appointments with 12-year-olds seeking puberty-blocking implants, prompting hundreds to protest these sudden and illegal denials of care. There is also a cruel irony to the fact that the most welcoming places for young trans people to live in the US also tend to carry with them a daunting if not prohibitive cost of living. Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example, are two of the 10 most “impossibly unaffordable” places to live in the world according to a Chapman University report.
“It’s not this immediate thing where you come here, you’re in a shelter and now everything’s OK,” says Halpern, who adds that we need more affordable housing and better funding for direct services like the ones the Ali Forney Center provides. “There’s a high number of people coming here for many reasons, so there is a lot of waiting for services to be assigned. It’s a testament to our clients’ endurance, making it through these really hard, long periods of waiting while advocating for themselves the whole time.” Still, Halpern reflects, very few of these people harbour regrets about leaving home: “No matter how bad things feel here, it’s still often better than the alternative. Any regret I’ve heard expressed is that things couldn’t be different, but I think my clients understand enough about the world and their own lives that whatever life they had back home is not worth longing for.”
Barbie Swae, a model and entertainer with deep roots in New York’s ballroom scene, says she’s met a few other trans people who’ve moved to the city from elsewhere to improve their quality of life. “I have a friend from Texas who came out here so she’d be able to get surgery,” she says, though signing a lease is far from the end of any trans woman’s problems here. “Another friend of mine who’s been living in her apartment for two, maybe three years, has been fighting with her neighbours because they’ve been trying to kick her out.”
Swae is planning a move to the five boroughs herself, though she’s spent so much of her time in NYC that some people probably think she’s already local. Born and raised in New Jersey, the 22-year-old has been a part of the ballroom community since she was 15. “I specialise in voguing, in femme queen performance,” she says. “I also walk femme queen face, realness and best-dressed.” With ballroom ever influencing the broader culture writ large, her talents led to her being cast in a Mugler fashion film for its spring/summer 2022 collection alongside Megan Thee Stallion, Bella Hadid, Chloë Sevigny and Dominique Jackson. In fact, Swae provides the film’s final shot, dipping under a spotlight as the screen cuts to black.
Despite having her family’s support when she transitioned in seventh grade (year 8) nearly a decade ago, being openly trans for the latter half of her school years was understandably difficult. “People don’t understand what it’s like at school behind closed doors,” she says. “It’s so much more raw when you’re actually there and you’re trans yourself. When you’re coming up, people don’t take you seriously. It shouldn’t take years to prove to anyone why you deserve to get what you want, like hormones or anything like that.” That dismissive attitude towards trans kids’ experiences has been crucial to the ongoing legislative attacks that they’ve been subjected to, as well as to the endless media debates that frame transness as a thought experiment, divorced from the people who live it. “A lot of these conversations about our lives right now are had without us, not just missing from the table but without a voice in that discussion,” says Richie of Tent, who, like Swae, transitioned in secondary school. “We know, as trans people, that we are experts on our [own] lives and our experiences. In some cases we’re even policy experts, legal experts, medical experts. We don’t need cis people to talk for us when we are here and able to draw on our own experiences to bring nuance and humanity to the debates we are having about real people’s lives.”
In recent years, Swae has been delving into other pockets of nightlife, like the city’s storied club-kid scene, where Amanda Lepore reigns supreme. She’s also got a TV project in the works, though she can’t disclose what it is just yet. Through it all, she’s still active in ballroom, along with so many newcomers who remind her of her past self. “There are so many more young girls than there were before – girls with a good head on their shoulders,” she says. “It was so different back in my day. You didn’t see so many girls that were new getting their life so fast.”
It’s clear the intention is to make it incredibly hard for people to stay here
And that seems to be the answer that so many younger trans Americans are turning to – building community as they chart a path forwards into a future filled with unknowns. One of those unknowns might just be how to continue building community in the months and years ahead, at least when it comes to doing so online. Social media and its direct predecessors – messageboards, blogging sites and even offline antecedents such as mail-in newsletters and postwar publications like Transvestia magazine – have long served a vital role in helping trans people find friends and lovers, spread information and share resources with one another. But with Trump advisor Elon Musk transforming Twitter into a safe space for neo-Nazis and the CEOs of Meta and TikTok stumbling over themselves in their respective desperate bids to court the president’s favour, that might have to change.
“Social media has been an instrumental tool for me as an artist and has helped me create long-lasting friendships,” says Trey, 26, a writer, podcaster and model from Boston. “Instagram was such an asset in my modelling career, and it helped me connect with the people who have since become family to me.” She finds men like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to be equal parts “unserious and immoral” but concedes that “these platforms are irreplaceable and I can’t code, so here we are! Until those two have an ayahuasca trip that gives them access to empathy, I will make the most of the apps and will be utilising the block button like it’s my God-given right. Every trans person I know is just trying to make it through the day safely and mind their own business. Instead of having all this smoke for 1.6% of the population, find a hobby! Read a book! Blow glass! I would really invite people to think about how they’d feel if their existence was questioned and attacked daily.”
With or without social media, Richie will continue to organise in his local community, testifying against harmful bills and driving people to rallies at the Texas State Capitol. For Essence up in Chicago, that means creating spaces for people to come together and party, as well as telling the people she loves that she loves them as much as she can, from her close friends and partners to strangers at the rave. “I have to say ‘I love you,’ even to the boy getting pounded in the dark room over there, because you never know what’s going to happen,” she says. “I think we’re going to get through it. We’ve gone so far. There’s no going back.”
This story features in the spring 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally on 6 March 2025. Buy a copy of the magazine here.
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