I'm Leaving

Actually doing what your extended family always joke about at Thanksgiving, but dumber

“Katherine! What words of encouragement do you have for transsexuals in 2026?”

I’m leaving the United States. Let’s talk about that. But first, some background.

In 2013, I latched onto a suggestion by a friend of mine that we and a few other friends should do a group cosplay as magical girls or something at a local convention. While that idea never panned out, the consequences of it being hooked into my brain for the next 7 years were profound. Eventually, after a bunch of gradually ramping psychological turmoil finally blew up in my face, I realized that I’m a woman and decided to live accordingly, whatever the cost might be. That’s a pretty high level summary that skips a lot of things, but that’ll be good enough for present purposes.¹

In parallel with this, in the mid-2010’s, a judicious internal rebrand of Trans Exclusive Radical Feminism to “gender-critical feminism” was taking shape in English-speaking culture. Somewhere along the line, it became not just acceptable, but desirable for TERFs to align themselves with extremist right-wing conservative and reactionary groups in order to push back against a growing acceptance for trans people and an increase in access for gender-affirming medical interventions. Whether by careful political maneuvering or by happenstance, far-right reactionary thinking has subsequently penetrated the mainstream conversation, and now somehow enjoys a seat at the grown-up table with the rest of the ideological spectrum.²

In the winter and spring of 2024, my then fiancée and I were looking at our future plans, and thanks to her flourishing career, we were deciding when and where to buy a house to settle down and actually be able to put things on the walls for once. Half a year and a major surgery later later, the election looming, we walked through the local park talking about the complex decision tree that would be forced by a bad federal outcome. I’m an American. She’s not. We’re both trans. If things went okay, we were thinking about kids and getting her American citizenship. If things didn’t go as we hoped and even half of what was promised came true, she would probably be forced out, and by extension, so would I. We talked about where we could go, where we even *wanted* to go, what decisions were forced by leaving, what our nebulous 2, 3, 5-year plans looked like. The long-term milestone stopped being “when we raise kids” and started being “if we can raise kids.” The election happened. Things went how they went. We got married the day after in the local courthouse, with just my family and the officiant and a cheesy string quartet we didn’t hire playing Taylor Swift covers present. And, after the nice judge who married us gave us a wink and a nudge and said, “Welcome to the fight,” we started nervously bracing for the worst and fleshing out those plans for absolutely not staying in the fight long-term.

There were, until recently, two main plans we had in the event that the US government refused to recognize the information on my wife’s legal documents as legitimate.³ The first was to go back to my wife’s country, and to petition for me to gain citizenship there. This gives me a passport independent of US jurisdiction, which is nice, but it’s not like that insulates me from the specter of my transness following me wherever I go for the rest of forever. I do still have to present documents with my old info on them for various reasons, and some institutions just refuse to be reasonable and change them for you. And besides, aiming for citizenship in a country without it being granted through family history takes a long time in almost any country. Where we would be going, it’s at least half a decade of commitment, and one where we would essentially be betting that things won’t go in a similar direction there, too. While we are ostensibly leaving the United States for political reasons that are outside of our control, both of us have wanted to believe that we’re not so hard up that we have to just go where we’re told when things get rough. Not yet, at least.

The second plan, which admittedly sounds out of left field, is to go to Japan. Neither of us is Japanese, neither of us has family there, and I certainly have no extant legitimate reason to be there. My wife, though, does have a job role that just so happens to coordinate with a partner team in Tokyo, so she can go - that’s one of us spoken for. Tokyo is a nice city! I’ve been there! I think it’d be lovely to call it home for a while. However, my hypothetical visa presents a bit of a problem. In a sane world, when a married couple moves from one country to another for the sake of one of the partners’ jobs, the other should be allowed to follow. However, the Japanese constitution (innocuously, if their courts are to be believed) did not account for the existence of the homosexual when it defined the bounds of marriage.⁴ So the idea of a dependent spousal visa is out. I can’t get a visa through employment, as I’m an independent musician and don’t work for a big company. I can’t get a visa through my art either, as proving one can make an honest living in Japan as a freelance artist of any sort is actually quite the endeavor with a high bar of scrutiny, and my current career is quite a strange one. A travel visa doesn’t permit anything longer than a 3-month stay, and I can’t revive my dreams of a doctoral music degree at a prestigious Japanese university without, you know, speaking fluent Japanese. This is quite the predicament, and honestly at this point I feel like most people would tap out and decide that they *are* in fact as hard up as they seemed and slink back to where their expat spouse is from for the long political winter.

But we’re not quitters. Having my wife be able to keep her job with a prestigious company in what is otherwise an incredibly turbulent time for both of us is not a small thing - it’s worth holding onto if we can. And, as it turns out, there are some viable means at our disposal. One of these would involve playing the international law equivalent of an Uno reverse card and getting me something roughly equivalent to a spousal dependent visa anyway - we may well still do this in the future, but not now. Another would (metaphorically) force me to get my (non-metaphorical) French maid uniform out of the closet and work for my wife⁵ - in addition to this being an extremely funny option, it is legitimate in some cases but not in ours, at least not immediately. What we will almost certainly end up doing instead is the one that requires by far the most self-sacrificing work on my end, which is getting me admitted into a language school program for as long as I can qualify for so I can remain in the country for the length of my student visa while I study Japanese in-depth. I’ve tried learning the language quite a few times over the years, none with any real success, but this whole situation could really be the motivation I needed to do something fun and interesting that I wanted to do anyway. So, that’s what I’m doing. The program I’ve applied to recommended a substantial period of self-study beforehand, so I took a 12-week intensive class to prepare for it - I never expected I could pick up a language so fast.⁶ My first term in Tokyo starts in July 2026.

If you had told me back in 2013 that the underlying impulse that gave me an itch to do genderbend cosplay would ultimately lead to me studying a language purely so I could remain with my trans lesbian wife after a hostile political campaign to delegitimize our existence rendered us bureaucratically unable to stay in the only country I’ve ever called home, I would have said, “Wait, back up, did you say I’m going to marry a lesbian?” But I guess that’s where we’re at. The situation feels kind of absurd. We’re going to live the expat life across the Pacific for a while in a place with demonstrably worse (although importantly, *not worsening*) rights for LGBTQ+ folks,⁷ but who knows, maybe we’ll both enjoy it enough to find a way to stay there long-term, or at least enjoy the ride. If nothing else, we’ll be landing on our feet.

My wife already lives away from most of her family, being an immigrant worker in the United States. But this will be my first time living abroad, far away from any family and with dense enough commitments that I can’t visit often. I’m giving up my music printing business, which I’ve built up over the course of 7 years. I’m subjecting myself to an extremely intense course of study in a subject I admittedly don’t excel in for several years for the sake of maintaining some measure of stability in my life by being able to stay with the love of my life. So many of the things I was hoping to have in the coming years (a home, a family, a renewed focus on my personal artistic practice) have turned to vapor in front of me as the current administration have bureaucratically made life here untenable. And, paradoxically, all the while my life has gone on more or less quietly - nobody knocking down my door (yet), nobody taking away my access to the medications I need to live (yet), nobody telling me I have no right to live-saving medically necessary surgery (yet), and by and large, not many people overtly treating me like the scum of the earth in my day-to-day interactions.⁸ By all rights, my wife and I are extremely lucky to have avoided so many of the political, medical, and social horrors that many trans people in the United States and elsewhere are facing right now. But with her visa expiry coming up and her not being able to provide documents that satisfy the government, danger has been looming large on the horizon nonetheless if we didn’t do something to avoid it. We’ve been fortunate enough to have options for preparing for that danger in order to minimize the damage to ourselves, and to be able to pursue those options early and fully.

I wish I could say I were happy about the move. It’ll be, without exaggeration, an adventure of a lifetime, and for that, I’m grateful.⁹ But to be honest, this experience has mostly left me feeling extremely embittered, politically and socially. I resent the current hyper-conservative incarnation of the US government who have intentionally put me in political limbo. I resent the large swaths of American voters who eagerly lapped up the lie of trans people as the source of their problems. I resent the milquetoast liberals for buckling on social progress and human rights for marginalized queers at the slightest inconvenience to themselves, and for believing the gaslighting of their conservative opponents that it was *they* who were obsessed with pushing a “trans agenda” (god, can you imagine if the Democrats actually did that? I wish…). I resent that in a country which in its best moments embodies the idea that your choices are your own, and that you can and should make what you can of yourself, that the opportunity to do so is being gleefully taken away from me. And most of all, I resent being hated by people who couldn’t even recognize that they’re supposed to hate me if they saw me on the street because they’ve never seen a trans person face to face in their goddamn lives. The slide into anti-trans fervor that has precipitated my current situation is just one of the many current political and economic trends that has left me with absolutely zero remaining trust in the idea that the arc of social progress bends forward and upward in the long-term. It has decimated my faith in the American project, and in the worth of and respect for the values and dreams I’ve inherited. Even if I move back (and you know what, I probably will someday), I don’t think I could ever forgive this place, my own home whose promises I’d grown up believing in, for doing that to me.

But hey, at least I’ll be able to watch anime without subtitles. 楽しみね。

1. A story for another time, maybe.

2. Some might even say the most important seat. I have plenty of thoughts on this, and I might write them down someday, but I would hate to be yet another trans person despairing into the void in all of the ways that have been well-tread already. I have plans for a broader series of essays on the shift away from trans rights in the English-speaking world, deconstructing the problems with how we talk about transness as self-advocates and allies, and making the (very messy) case for a fundamental shift to a radically sex-positive approach to sex and gender. In the words of Zach Hadel impersonating Donald Trump praising Lewis Lovhaug, “It’ll be out when it’s out. And we like that, it’ll be out when it’s out.”

3. Explaining how this happened takes far too long, so I will instead link you to Erin in the Morning’s explanation from when the story first broke that trans immigration was going to become thorny. My wife and I have sought much legal advice since, none of which has been able to conclusively say what would happen if she tried to extend her stay in the US.

4. See also: Hallmark movies. Funny enough, I actually have only 2 degrees of separation from a couple who are involved in the legal fight for gay marriage in Japan. Pretty cool! Before the current prime minister took office, I was actually extremely optimistic for the chances of that succeeding, but now, who knows.

5. Foreigners in Japan who hold certain visas can apparently hire and bring personal assistants or domestic servants. I’m just gonna leave whatever implications that has on the table for your amusement, because we’ve certainly talked about them.

6. Granted, I couldn’t even hold a conversation with a five year-old this point, but cut me some slack. Japanese is hard! In a way, I’m honestly glad that this is the thing that helped my independent study ambitions become reality, because without external pressures motivating me, I don’t think I ever would have gotten over that hurdle.

7. While things are undoubtedly tough in Japan for LGBTQ+ Japanese nationals, as foreigners who’ve already changed any relevant documentation we are largely insulated from those things. As far as the Japanese government is concerned, our documentation is legitimate and the private healthcare market can provide for whatever ongoing medical needs we have.

8. Shouts out to the crazy woman on the train 3 years ago who absolutely tore into me for over an hour, calling me every slur under the sun and threatening to kill me multiple times. I respect your stamina. Most people would have gotten bored or tired, but you, you had the inner strength to speak your mind no matter how much you were ignored. Inspirational.

9. To be clear, I am genuinely so, so excited to live in Tokyo! I’ll probably I’ll gush about it sometime next year, after I actually move.