‘Not Everyone Can Leave’: Survival Advice from Trans Teens in Texas

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Deceleration, coproduced with Truthout, and is republished here with permission.

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“The hostility has always been there,” Paul told me. “But I feel like it truly began to ramp up like 2020.”

A 16-year-old student at a large public high school in a large Texas city, Paul (a pseudonym to protect his safety) is a varsity athlete with aspirations to join the FBI. But in 2020 he was still in middle school. Texas wouldn’t pass its first anti-trans bill—a sports ban on trans youth playing on the team aligning with their gender—for another year. But Paul remembers watching sports bans passing in other states and feeling unsettled, “hearing [rumored] horror stories of kids having to take their pants off and have teachers check them. I wasn’t out yet. But [another family member] was. So it was really scary. I couldn’t at the time tell why it scared me so much. But thinking about it [was] like an invasion of my privacy, even though it wasn’t directly happening to me.”

For Mike—another 16-year-old trans guy who likes cooking, playing bass, and hanging out with his friends—his first awareness of something shifting in Texas happened around the same time, also from hearing about political developments in other states. Ron DeSantis’ 2019 inauguration as governor of Florida, which launched anti-trans restrictions on sports, health care, and Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, was a key memory for him, making a big impression on him as a youth living in Texas, another red state: “That’s when I decided, if I’m going to college”—the son of immigrants, he would be the first in his family to go to college—“I need to get out of here. I don’t think it’s safe for me to stay here.”

Much of the mainstream media coverage of anti-trans legislation has focused on families of trans youth that have been forced to flee their home states. Often left out, however, are the stories of subterranean survival from the invisible majority of young trans Texans, many youth of color, who can’t leave.

Pro-LGBTQ+ advocates at the Texas Capitol in May 2021 (Erich Schlegel/AP Images for Human Rights Campaign)

Even as we wake up this November to the heavy reality of what a second Trump presidency and both chambers of Congress red means for LGBTQ+ communities—along with refugees, Palestinians, and the Earth itself—we cannot forget that for the past three years, even under a Biden/Harris administration, Christofascist and white nationalist movements in Texas and other red states have already been inflicting state terror on trans and nonbinary youth.

As such, these unheard stories from young trans people unable to flee Texas now hold urgent lessons for all of us about how to resist by existing, in the face of fascistic movements seeking to deny so many communities the right just to be alive.

To make some of these stories visible, Deceleration and Truthout spoke with two trans boys of color who have not been able to flee the state. Their experiences are not representative of all trans youth in Texas—the voices of trans girls and nonbinary youth are missing here—but as one of their friends emphasized to me, “Trans men in Texas need more representation in the media right now.”

Since that first sports ban cleared the Texas legislature in 2021, it’s been no secret that Texas, like Florida, has been a laboratory for anti-trans legislation, with trans youth the publicly acceptable test case for a wider policy push to eliminate trans people from public life.

And not only public life: The accumulated weight of this policy reality on the literal lives of trans youth is now quantitatively visible. Publishing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers affiliated with the Trevor Project recently released a devastating study finding a causal link between state-level anti-trans laws—bans on sports participation, school activities, health care, updates to legal identification, and bathroom access—and suicide risk among trans and gender nonbinary (TGNB) youth.

Based on a study of 61,240 TGNB youth aged 13-24, researchers found that states that passed anti-trans laws saw an up to 44 percent increase in past-year suicide attempts starting the second year after these laws passed. For younger teens, the impact was more severe: Suicide risk among kids age 13-17 was up to 72 percent higher in the year immediately after passage.

The younger you are, in other words, the more lethal the impact of anti-trans laws. The study’s researchers surmise that this is because these laws have tended to target minors, but also because young people depend on their parents more, both for healthcare and for access to queer and trans-affirming resources. So if youth lack family support—as many queer and trans kids do—that particular form of intimate family violence only compounds and magnifies the state violence of anti-trans legislation. This is, in fact, the main takeaway from conversations with young trans guys of color currently living in Texas.

The cruel paradox of this reality is that those most deeply impacted by anti-trans laws are also those with the least ability to publicly voice that experience safely. This also explains why the most visible stories of state bans on trans life focus on supportive families forced to flee their home states to access healthcare for their kids, though even most supportive families “need or want to stay in the community that they’ve already been raising their child in,” according to Carolyn Jones, program manager for Campaign for Southern Equality’s Trans Youth Emergency Project.

Not that fleeing has had an insubstantial impact. According to the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey of over 92,000 trans people age 16 and up, nearly 50 percent have considered leaving their state of residence due to anti-LGBTQ+ laws, while around 5 percent have actually been internally displaced. And even these figures obscure the lived experience of those fleeing. “Because obviously, given the nature of why they’re leaving, nobody wants to keep records on that kind of stuff. Because also you have this state that’s weaponizing subpoenas and trying to get people’s medical information,” explained Chloe Goodman, a social worker who serves as constituent services manager for Equality Texas. “So that’s really the main problem, is that for the sake of safety, we sacrifice a big-picture understanding of what’s happening.”

As horrifying as it is that these trans youth have become refugees in their own country, being able to leave—and then speak publicly about it—assumes a level of family support and resources many TGNB youth just don’t have. What gets left out are the less visible stories of those who cannot leave the state, who are not part of the only 18 percent of LGBTQ+ Texas youth describing their families as “high support”—the stories of kids of color like Paul and Mike who make up the vast majority of LGBTQ+ youth in Texas (65 percent, according to data for Texas from the Trevor Project’s 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Mental Health).

Catelyn Devlin, a licensed social worker who did flee Texas for a safer state but continues to chair the Texas LGBTQ+ Child Welfare Workgroup, confirms this irony. “Families who can afford to be public about having a child who’s trans or be really involved in the equality movements—a lot of those families have been white,” she said. “And there are a lot of reasons why families of color need to be that much more careful about information that gets out there.”

This is particularly acute for Black families of trans children in the wake of state weaponization of Child Protective Services against families of trans youth, because the history of anti-Black racism in the child welfare system has meant that “Black parents or caregivers of any kid in Texas ha[ve] a much higher risk of having a removal and an abuse allegation substantiated due to racism in the child welfare system. And [so] we don’t see those families represented in the media,” Devlin said.

Though Devlin was speaking primarily about the impacts of anti-trans policy on queer and trans foster youth in Texas, Mike and Paul also registered the seismic force of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott’s efforts to ban transition-related healthcare administratively and criminalize its provision. When the Texas Legislature failed to pass a formal ban during its 2021 session, State Representative Matt Krause in August 2021 asked Paxton to issue a legal opinion on whether gender-affirming care could be considered child abuse. Paxton responded affirmatively in February 2022, and the next day Abbott directed the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate families accessing this care for their trans children.

Mike recalled that, at the time, Abbott’s directive affected one of his friends, “who I’m pretty sure had to cease transition for a while” due to their family’s uncertainty about how far the state would go and fears that they would be targeted. “And it was just like, what am I going to do when it’s my turn?”

But for kids like Mike and Paul—whose family support has been shaky or nonexistent to begin with—the primary impact of anti-trans legislation has been far less visible and far more intimate: It’s been on the degree of rejection or outright transphobia they experience in their own families. Mike, for instance, came out to his family in middle school, and since then has seen how anti-trans legislation shifted their attitude from passively to actively unsupportive: “When I first told them [I was trans], they were confused. They didn’t really understand it. So they kind of ignored it. Then with all of the stuff being passed in Florida [and] making its way to Texas—they are very religious, and now they aren’t very supportive of it. They don’t really talk about it. But when my dad does talk about it, he doesn’t talk about it in a very supportive way.”

Paul talked more specifically about the way in which the medical disinformation used to justify anti-trans legislation has taken over the minds of even his closest relatives, like a “satanic panic for trans people”—a reference to the 1980s conspiracy theory alleging a widespread epidemic of satanic ritual abuse.

“Since the bills, I’ve noticed that all of my family has become more hostile towards me,” he said, describing “a very noticeable disconnect” with a favorite aunt who had been “like a second mom.” But after 2021 they grew distant, his aunt asking after he came out “if I had seen anything that made me change the way I looked” and trying to tell him about “this article she had read about how being trans was like a sickness and you could overcome it.” He also described living for a time with a grandparent who would purposely “loudly play anti-trans videos, because mine and his rooms were connected, and dude—it was really fucking scary. Like how there’s this plan [Project 2025] that Republicans have to wipe out all trans people. It was obviously directed towards me and [other family members].”

Even otherwise supportive family members were not immune to the pseudoscience about trans healthcare that often justifies anti-trans legislation. When his younger relative wanted to go on puberty blockers, Paul recalled learning that their mom was now “against [blockers], against testosterone. She’s like, ‘read this bill, it’s talking about this.’ And [she’s] not even Republican! She’s not anti-trans necessarily. It just shows that these bills they’re trying to pass … they’re not just affecting the minds of Republican people. It’s affecting the way people think of these things, like everyone.”

Asked what they want readers outside Texas to know about their lives here, both teens stressed that “the community of trans people and gay people, it’s not small here in Texas, at all,” Paul said. “If anything, LGBTQ communities have become a lot closer and stronger in Texas.” Mike, whose primary source of support is school rather than home, added: “I have found so many amazing teachers and friends that support me that I don’t think people would even know that type of support is a thing in Texas. But,” he went on to say, “there definitely is a lot of violence against being trans in Texas.” Paul worded this more strongly, reflecting on the street harassment he has experienced, including having a gun pulled on him, “all for me being trans”: “I felt, more than I ever have in my entire life since coming out, that my life is in danger.”

And yet there are cracks even within something as massive and totalizing as Texas transphobia, unexpected spaces of support and acceptance. Despite the state’s formal restrictions on sports for trans youth, Paul’s most crucial form of support is on his athletic team at school, given that skill and size are far more salient organizing principles than gender for his particular sport.

“So, like, Coach doesn’t care. He is so accepting—he’ll call you whatever you like. None of that matters to him. What matters to him is, you’re going out there and you’re winning. And if you’re not winning, you’re still going to be [Paul] who’s a guy. You’re just going to be [Paul], a guy who’s losing.”

(Ivan Flores/Texas Observer)

The realest talk, the hardest won advice for living, came in response to my final question for each teen, what I thought of as the RuPaul question—the one Mama Ru routinely asks her final four queens at the end of each season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”: What advice would they give to their younger selves? To younger trans kids stuck in Texas?

Mike recommended finding “people your age that support you.” He added: “But you also need to find adults that you can feel safe with, whether that be extended family or like a teacher or somebody at school. Just having an adult that you feel safe with adds a lot. It helped me a lot with telling more people, since the first ever adult I told was [a] teacher, and she gave me the confidence to begin telling other teachers, which gave me the confidence to tell my friends. Because when I was younger, that seemed like such a scary thing: Telling an adult—oh, that’s going to lead back to my parents, and it’s going to be a whole thing. But there’s always going to be a support group out there. And then, like—it’s not going to last forever. If you’re in a tough space, we’ll get through it, and we’ll be able to look back.”

Paul urged younger trans folks to inoculate their self-worth from the hatred of others and to conserve their emotional energy. He said that if he could send a message to his younger self, he would say ,“It’s not worth it to hide” being trans. He would also tell his younger self: “Family isn’t who you’re related to; family’s who cares about you. And that’s a really cliché thing to say. But that’s a really fucking hard truth to accept. Especially as a young person. But honestly, the key to happiness is to stop caring about what people around you think.”

He added: “Don’t suck up to transphobic people, even if it feels good. It’s not worth your time, it’s not worth your energy, and it’s so fucking dangerous and stupid, and you will either come out not alive from it or wish you weren’t alive from it. It’s just not worth the fight. And they’re never gonna care about you, because they’re assholes. The safest thing is just to find people who care about you. Even if it’s hard. I would rather spend 10 years trying to find someone who accepts me than spend 10 years trying to make this person accept me.”

The advice, then—beyond “get out of Texas,” also on the list for Paul—is not to stop fighting, but to withdraw energy from those who would deny us life and invest it instead in community, solidarity, each other. It is a national shame that any child has to learn this lesson. As we stare down the barrel of a GOP trifecta very few of us can flee, may all of us adults be as brave as these teens in refusing the fascist project of trans elimination with everything we’ve got.

The post ‘Not Everyone Can Leave’: Survival Advice from Trans Teens in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.