Why I Fled the USA

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I left the USA for Bangkok on March 26, 2025, Thailand. Some say I fled the USA. I sometimes also say I fled, depending on the room. The people who say I fled also sometimes call me a refugee, and sometimes I, too, depending on the room, might call myself a refugee, even if just to test how it feels. In other rooms, I may say I am an exile or a migrant or an aspiring immigrant or an itinerant transsexual, a global drifter, just like my grandfather. I sometimes just say I don’t know where else I could be.

If I call myself a refugee, it will inevitably—and not unreasonably—prompt people to discuss my decisions and circumstances in ways that make me feel uncomfortable. If what I care about is telling someone something about my world, then using the word refugee will do more to confuse than to communicate. If I want someone to understand my situation, I have to explain it in full, but it is too much of a burden, in day-to-day life, to explain all of this in full. Writing on the internet, I cannot adapt my language to the room. I begin to explain.

Maybe I can take this word—refugee—and give it a little spin. Or maybe I should leave it alone. But this is, either way, about more than just semantics: one cannot, as a citizen of the USA or even a resident of a Western country, accept that this word—which tends to evoke small boats, rough seas, mountain treks, torn clothes, dark skin, poverty, and camps, and which people generally try to keep clear of whiteness—should be anywhere near me without changing how one sees the world.

On the day I started writing this essay, I had been living in Thailand one day short of a year. I do not have refugee status here. I am on a tourist visa. I live in a nice apartment in a quiet neighborhood. I keep in touch with only a small number of people back home in Los Angeles. I have no path to residency. Unless I somehow become wealthy enough to afford a “privilege visa”—somewhere around $50,000 out of pocket—the longest I believe I can stay here for will be another four years. Most of my friends are Thai, and I have friends who call themselves ‘expats’ or ‘transplants’ and friends who some might call refugees from Russia, Myanmar, Mongolia, and elsewhere but who, even if, like me, they don’t have refugee status and do not tend call themselves refugees, would still have a simple answer, if someone told them to go back to their own country: I can’t.

Cue the question: What do you mean, you can’t?

My friends from Myanmar are here because of a civil war—or multiple civil wars, depending on how you look at it, because a unified version of their country for now only exists as a possibility—even if they still have family members in Yangon and Mandalay whom no one has yet killed or maimed. They got here by getting into school here; they, like me, live comfortable lives, while some friends of theirs who went to the UK as asylum seekers are living in much more precarious circumstances.

My Russian friend is a lesbian who protested the Ukraine war. It’s not like a warrant appeared for their arrest, but they judged their situation as urgent enough that they let traffickers take them out of the country; they escaped the trafficking spot in Montenegro, fled to Georgia, then made enough money stripping to travel to Thailand, where we might all lie by the pool at their sugar daddy’s mansion.

The mother of my friend from Mongolia, a former mining magnate, lost everything, having made enough enemies that the whole family had to flee.

Both my Russian and Mongolian friend do sex work: they work, as I sometimes still do, as professional dominatrices. We live vastly different lives but share in some common feeling—of having nowhere to return to but nowhere, either, to remain—that alienates us from many of the people around us, who still seem to measure their lives—even the queer people and the drifters—against the timelines of those they believe resemble them. We do not feel there are so many others who resemble us, we who know how fortunate we are to be doing so well but know, also, how easily things could change at any time. And we also know a truth that lies behind almost any of the loneliest positions: despite all appearances, we are legion.

I have friends from the USA who call themselves refugees but who still go back to visit their homes. This is not really an option for me. It may no longer be an option for them soon enough, either. None of the British trans people I know here would call themselves refugees, although I have heard some use the word, ‘flee’; the people in the UK who suffer the most might be those who have yet to transition, having to wait an average of five years to get only a first appointment at a gender clinic (some have been waiting for more than eight years, with no clear end in sight): their lives may look, to an outsider, like unexceptional examples of cis men and women struggling in a society where almost everyone is struggling, anyway. Data shows that suicides by trans teenagers in the UK have been on the rise since 2020, and the data precedes both the 2024 indefinite ban on puberty blockers for those under 18 and the EHRC guidance that effectively bans trans people from single sex spaces, coming into effect on August 6th, 2026

You also can’t make a record of the extent of the harm that anti-trans legislation and infrastructure does when it is so punishing for so many of us even to just admit what we are. We know that such an admission comes at a great social cost: stigma, job loss, social ostracization, greater vulnerability to violence and rape, and a life at the mercy of a medical system that governments are actively working to restrict access to.

The erasure of transsexuals, in particular—those for whom gender affirming care is life-saving medicine—is one of the quietest in history, easy to frame as a peaceful return to a prior norm: In the trans community, we might tell a suicidal friend that we don’t want them to become ‘just another statistic,’ but most of the pre-transition suicides in Britain won’t even get to be that. These are not easy topics, and most people arrive to discuss them unaware of just how much misinformation they have already accumulated before anyone even opens their mouths to speak.

It might seem like judging whether one is a refugee is a simple matter. The UN defines refugees as “people who have fled their countries to escape conflict, violence, or persecution and have sought safety in another country.” Many refugees “have been forced to flee with little more than the clothes on their back, leaving behind their homes, possessions, jobs and loved ones.” I believe I left or fled the USA to escape persecution, but it is not easy for me to substantiate the threat to the satisfaction of others, never mind a foreign government, and the USA is not my country, so I have to answer also for why I would not return to the UK. It is partly because the USA is not my country that I needed to leave or flee when I did. What do I mean by needed here? It is the cousin of the question, ‘What do you mean, you can’t go back?’ I had plenty more than the clothes on my back. I had two suitcases. In one of them, I buried a Playstation 5 in bubble wrap and towels. I bought myself this luxury machine to celebrate my acceptance, two years prior, onto a fully funded PhD program in Los Angeles. This acceptance felt like a major milestone on a career path that now seems to lie oceans away. But what kind of refugee packs a Playstation 5 in her luggage? It almost seems an insult to the term.

In the opening chapter of the Heritige Foundation’s Project 2025—which many, rightly, took as a partial manifesto for the incoming administration, since by now, by some estimates, more than half of its ideas have been put into action—the authors write that “pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare.” “Transgender ideology”—which one can only presume includes transgender people—becomes pornography, which, according to this manifesto, the government ought to ban.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump put out Executive Order 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, which elaborates on the notion of “gender ideology”:

’Gender ideology’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

This executive order effectively affirms that someone like me, whom doctors assigned male at birth, cannot be a woman. Not only am I not what I say I am, but I am not what my legal documents say I am.

Executive Order 14161, which Donald Trump published on the same day, Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats, recommends:

…any actions necessary to protect the American people from the actions of foreign nationals who have undermined or seek to undermine the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people, including, but not limited to, our Citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists.

The Republican party spent $215 on anti-trans advertising in the run-up to the election. Our rights are under attack from so many angles. But for my present purposes, these three bits of information should suffice. The argument, for me, following January 20^th, was quite simple: The President had made clear an ideal goal of a) invaliding the legal identity of anyone for whom a mismatch existed between the gender on their legal documents and the gender on their birth certificate, b) taking the existence of transgender people (“transgender ideology”) as an explicit threat to the culture and safety of the nation, and c) taking “any action necessary” against any foreign nationals whom it deemed a threat to the culture, implicitly framing them as terrorists, which I presumed could include academics and writers.

I think it would be easy for someone, back in January 2025, to hear me bring all this up and feel that I was perhaps reading a little too much into things. But I was also seeing how strongly motivated the administration was to maximize numbers when rounding people up for detention and deportation. Living in LA, I saw how ICE began to terrorize those in the communities around me, even if I saw minimal reportage to reflect the scale and speed at which ICE had mobilized. I was anticipating a Trump victory from relatively early in 2024, at a time when almost no one around me was taking the prospect seriously, so I had little patience, at this point, for people’s doubts about what might happen next. I gave a presentation in a class in November 2024 in which I predicted with an uncomfortable degree of accuracy how the US might look in the early months of the administration. And I think it is good sense, as a foreigner, even as a white foreigner, to take it seriously when the executive branch of the most powerful government in the world explains in depth why it sees someone like you as a threat.

I set my red line. I did not expect things to happen so quickly. On March 8^th 2025, ICE agents entered the Manhattan apartment of Mahmoud Khalil, an international student living on a green card, without a warrant, to take him into custody. On March 15^th, the administration flew 238 Venezuelan men and 23 Salvadoran men to CECOT, a torture facility in El Salvador, with little to no justification; it did not matter to me that these were not international students: it was just another reminder of the cruelty of the administration, as well as how little they are bound by what counts as acceptable or rational. On March 25^th, six plainclothes agents in masks kidnapped Rümeysa Öztürk, another international student, near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. On March 29^th, I landed in Bangkok, Thailand, and the months following, the US State Department revoked more than 8,000 student visas, seemingly using AI to pick its targets, sometimes revoking a visa for political writing and sometimes for something as minor as a parking ticket.

While some people around me saw my decision as the product of an almost hysterical state of paranoia, I saw it as a rational wager. A possible future existed where, because of the way a few government decisions overlapped with my position in US society, I could find myself in an indefinite detention, possibly kept with men, in a situation where being deported to the UK would now seem like a best-case outcome. If I left, and it turned out that I never, in fact, needed to leave, then it should not be so hard for me to return. I borrowed from the wager of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who argued believing in God and being right, hence getting sent to heaven, was so much better than not believing and being wrong, then ending up in hell. If I left, and I was right to leave, I would be safe. If I stayed, and I was wrong to stay, I’d be in hell.

But what if I was still in the US now, at the time of writing this? Might I not be living a safe and relatively comfortable life? Even if so, I would still be watching the rising tide: the 126 anti-trans bills passed in 2025, the bathroom bans, the military bans, the athlete bans, blanket bans of trans healthcare for youth and young adults, the bans on changing identity markers, the bills in favor of sending trans women to men’s prison and medically detransitioning them; how the state of Kansas suddenly revoked the driver’s license of all trans residents who had updated their gender markets; the way the right wing somehow even found a way to blame trans people for Charlie Kirk’s murder, because the killer had an affiliation with a trans person, who was cooperating with authorities; the red flag alerts from the Lemkin Institute, arguing that trans people in the US were in the early stages of a genocide; but most importantly, for me, the continued denial of so many cis people, who, acting like nothing serious was unfolding, have never freed me from the question: If no one acknowledges this is happening, then how can anyone stop it?

I would still be asking if I should leave. I would still be asking if it was not a matter of if but when. My friends would still be telling me that I can’t keep living like this. I would still be watching the goalposts move. I began writing this essay at a time when I was questioning my decision to leave. A few weeks into working on it, the White House published its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy (which I first read about on here via Ken Klippenstein’s reporting). “Our national [counterterrorism] activities,” it says, “will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” using “all the tools available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.” It described Charlie Kirk’s assassin as a “radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

So who are these groups? What counts as membership? Since the kinds of groups the administration present here are based in fantasy, do they even have a real-world counterpart? What difference is there, in the administration’s eyes, between someone who “espouses extreme transgender ideology” and a trans person who speaks? What tools would they actually use? Who might they sweep up as collateral damage?

And how could the way Donald Trump ends his foreword to the document fail to haunt just a little: “As I said after our first successful counterterrorism mission, just days after I was sworn back in office – if you hurt Americans, or are planning to hurt Americans, ‘We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.’”

I am, when in the US, a foreign national. The essay you are reading espouses what the current administration would view as an anti-American and radically pro-transgender ideology. My PhD thesis examines the concept of trans genocide and the uses of political violence. My writing on Palestine and mass deportations will render me, to them, a terrorist sympathizer. If you Google my name, the first few pages of results consist of me and my work, most of it relating to transgender rights. I run a WhatsApp support group for trans people in the US and elsewhere who are considering relocating to Thailand.

But still, if I had remained in the US, I would probably be fine. Right? Because, at the end of the day, I’m just an ordinary person living an ordinary life, and these things, surely, are not meant for ordinary people. Or at least not the ordinary people who have legal documentation to affirm their right to be on US soil, because we all know what happens to the ordinary people who don’t have this: the administration calls them violent criminals of the worst kind, rounds them up, and puts them in camps.

For me, personally, I do not, in fact, care too much whether anyone wants to call me a refugee or a prospective refugee or to vehemently argue that I’m not. I don’t need anyone’s sympathy. I am building a life here, and it is my right to grieve the life I left behind, whatever opinions others have about whether I was right to do so. And I have no plans to go down any formal asylum-seeking route, even if I do know trans people who are in the midst of that process as I write. I bring the word up, and I place it against my situation, for only one reason: Even if I am safe, there are many like me who are not; something serious is happening, and unless more people are willing to face it, nothing is going to stop it.

Thank you for reading! This is a topic I find hard to write about.

This is a reader-supported publication and may, quite soon, be my only regular source of income. If you value this work, please consider paying for a full subscription, which will give you access to over 180,000 words of my work, or tipping me on my Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/thaliavacha. If you can afford to do neither but still want to support, please like this essay and share it online and with friends.