Trans People Are Fleeing North Texas, What Happens Next?

The Dallas arts scene can feel like a small town. All too often, you have the same old conversations with the same old faces, over and over again. That’s why when you meet someone like Elliot Hazel, you remember it.

When he arrived in Dallas last summer, he immediately immersed himself in the local scene through concert photography, homemade zines and an effervescent personality that reverberates throughout.

In just a year, Hazel found community in Dallas through the highlight reels of many a late-night show and morning coffee runs. As quickly as he seemed to find roots taking shape, though, Hazel, a trans man, found himself eager to follow a migration of trans people leaving Texas for bluer pastures.

Redirects like Hazel’s have become all too common among the LGBTQ+ community in recent years.

In 2023, we reported on a Plano-based realty group that launched an initiative called “Flee Red States” to help LGBTQ+ people sell their homes and find new housing elsewhere. At the time, Brianna Hurley, the mother of a transgender child, told us she decided to leave in 2022 after a local school district began to enforce “Don’t Say Gay” anti-trans rules for sports and bathroom use. Since then, the 89th Texas Legislative Session came to a close on June 2 with another flurry of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in its ruins, leaving Hazel to face the reality of his now-shifted future in a state like Texas.

“You really have to assess the value of what’s gonna actually affect your life and what isn’t,” Hazel says. “Someone going home and making a comment is not gonna affect my life. But me shutting myself down, making myself feel small and compact and digestible, that’s gonna hurt me 10 billion times more.”

In his experience, the latter came true far too often.

“If I apply as a trans person, I’ve noticed that I won’t get calls back for interviews for those jobs,” he says. “But if I apply under my dead name, I will.”

After finally landing a job using a résumé with he/him pronouns, Hazel says that his identity was disregarded as he was referred to with she/her pronouns, even after telling management that was happening.

There lies an uncomfortable quandary of daily life as a trans person. For many, though, packing up and leaving is a months or even years-long process. Hazel wants to escape environments where his existence is a wound constantly salted with neglect, but he can’t afford to without saving up.

In the meantime, he finds community in the city’s underground arts and music scene.

“I feel like it’s known that if you are in that counterculture area, you are in the fight with us,” he says. “To have that space where I can fully express myself and make art about being myself ties it all together. It’s a very sacred space for me, especially Denton … it’s nice to have those little pockets of space, because you get into [rural areas] and stop at a gas station, and people are looking at you crazy-eyed. But then you go to Denton and you look like everybody else there.”

Searching for a Safe Haven

Hazel is far from the only trans person to cite Denton as a haven. Julia Ava W Boehme is a trans woman and musician who fronts the psych rock band Starfruit. She’s lived in North Texas for her entire life, but has seen her social bandwidth change in recent years.

“Over the past several years, especially since COVID, I felt a lack of support and community,” she says. “Now, it’s kind of whittled down to that I [only] feel [community] like that in Rubber Gloves.”

She’s referring to the long-standing Denton music venue, which has been a hub for the LGBTQ+ community and alternative music scene.

“There’s other venues that are supportive and good,” she says. “But that’s kind of the only place where I see other trans people, and that’s where a feeling of safety comes from. It’s not just the venue or the people running the venue, but the people who are there.”

By November, Boehme is set to move to Philadelphia, after a visit to the city with her partner came as a wake-up call.

“I was just noticing how much more free we feel and how different my interactions with strangers are,” she says. “I love Texas a lot. I love the land and how it feels to be here in an environmental sense. But in a social sense, it’s horrible. This has been a really hard decision to make.”

As a lifelong resident, Boehme has noticed a cultural shift. She says opportunities for connection with the average North Texan have thinned out.

“I don’t really know that they’ve gotten worse, but the ones that are good have gotten less frequent,” she says. “There’s just less and less opportunities to be part of a community. I mean, that is partially due to people moving away, but it’s also due to the city of Dallas specifically just isn’t looking out for us.”

For those like Boehme, who have only ever known Texas as their home, it’s a harsh reality to reckon with, but she has found solace in knowing there is a way to find community again.

“I’ve known trans people who have moved away, and that’s like a beacon of hope for me,” she says. “You can live in a place where you thrive and where people celebrate you.”

A trans man named Logan B. shines a light from a beacon similar to Boehme’s vision. He moved from Dallas to Aurora, Colorado, in 2023.

“I was one of the earlier ones to get the hell out of dodge,” he says. “In 2021, Ken Paxton basically demanded of the DMV a list of all people who had changed the gender marker on their driver’s license. That was the ‘we have to leave’ [moment]. If they’re gathering lists of us, there’s something going on.”

Logan got the idea for moving to Aurora specifically from a blog post by trans journalist Erin Reed. Reed publishes an annual “anti-trans risk assessment map” based on state legislation. From the chart, he was split between California, Colorado and Illinois.

“We have a way out, and it is moving to another state where you will be supported,” he says. “That is unfortunate, and I honestly do hope that things can shift in Texas. But looking at the legislation that has been passed and what they’re trying to get passed, it’s not ideal.”

Law of Defection

The recently ended Texas legislative session had numerous proposed bills that would target LGBTQ+ Texans. Not all passed, but Equality Texas, a statewide nonprofit for LGBTQ+ rights, identified six that did as “Anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation.”

Among them is House Bill 1257, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed and will become law on Sept. 1. The bill states that any insurance company offering coverage for gender-affirming care must also cover fees if the person decides to detransition. Despite a low rate of detransitions, many worry the law will push health insurance companies to end gender-affirming coverage altogether.

Texas House Bill 229 and Senate Bill 1188 both seek to define male and female under strictly biological terms. The bills are of particular concern for trans Texans, who see the move as an attempt to erase their existence.

One trans woman, Sachiel, didn’t mince words regarding the legislation.

“This is stage one of genocide,” she says. “I think they’re using trans people as a distraction so they can create an illusion that they’re getting something done politically.”

It’s the nature of the bully to relentlessly pick on the smallest and most vulnerable to compensate for something else.

A 2022 study by the Williams Institute, which describes itself as a “research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy,” estimated that just 0.5% of the country’s adult population identifies as transgender. For many, a laser focus on the mere existence of people who make up 0.5% of the community would seem an unlikely way to improve life in Texas. Even in an imperfect world with prejudices, 0.5% would mean that even the bigots would have bigger targets, right? A reality where bullies continue to strong-arm the vulnerable minority is the reality that Hazel, Boehme and others are navigating.

“There’s a lot of concern from people in society not knowing how to live in a multicultural society,” Sachiel asserts. “People are not used to being confronted with other languages, other cultures, other religions, other people. They’re having a hard time understanding how to process that. I think when you face a group of people that are struggling to understand that from an intellectual, social or emotional perspective, you can regress into isolationism.”

But like Boehme, Sachiel holds on to hope –  a lasting dream in which trans people are able to comfortably know the same home that so many of their neighbors don’t have to question.

“There might be a period of regression socially, with younger trans people,” Sachiel hypothesizes. “But I think once they come of age, it’ll be another wave that the current political and social opposition will not have enough manpower or political sway to push back against. I think it’s inevitable that trans people will be integrated into American society.”

There are still many battles to overcome before trans people won’t have to flee their homes in an exodus, though. Sachiel says the gender constructs that have long been ingrained in American culture have to evolve.

“When you have a society that focuses only on two genders, it’s easier to assign these gender roles that participate economically and socially,” she says. “When you ignore the existence of trans people within these definitions, it creates medical disparity, it creates emotional disparity. It creates incoherence of individuals existing within these paradigms of thinking and perception. How bodies are supposed to behave versus the actuality of how bodies of people behave on their own terms. We are existing in a time where the colonial narrative of gender being a binary is unsustainable because it’s not based in reality.”

Standing Ground

As Hazel goes about his days, he often sees his photos shared on social media, and his art on walls, but it’s diluted by the fact that he can’t land on what he wants to see supported most: his safe existence. For as quickly as he fell in love with Texas, it would not love him back.

“Part of me doesn’t want to leave,” he says. “Because the more of us that are here, the more of us that are not succumbing to the idea that we are bad and we need to be eradicated. But you cannot wait for the oppressor to create a safe space for you. You have the power to create it. We forget that the whole basis of this country is freedom and liberty, and that applies to trans people more than ever.”

The hypocrisy isn’t lost on him.

“They preach freedom, and then their whole goal is to take away ours,” he says. “What makes my freedom any less valid than yours? Maybe you don’t understand it, but I don’t understand the way you live your life. I would never want to live exactly your life, but I think you have every right to do that.”

Much like his fellow trans Texans, Hazel rests in the comfort of escape. Even if the geographical move is ultimately just a temporary victory in the face of a still-raging war on LGBTQ+ people, for now, it’s the small steps that will fuel the greater progress.

“I understand that there are [people] who can’t just up and leave,” he says. “Their whole life is built here, or they have their family. But the thing about trans people, it’s everywhere. It doesn’t matter where your mailing address is. We’re all in this fight together, no matter where we’re living. So yeah, it’s more dangerous here, but at the end of the day, we’re all trans. We’re all queer. We’re all fighting the same fight.”