Crow Harmony never felt at ease living in Florida as a transgender guy. The state has some of the most restrictive anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the country, and Harmony said he struggled to find employers willing to hire trans people. Last fall, after Harmony’s boyfriend transitioned, the couple lost their housing.
They were just 21 and 20 with no money or job prospects, so Harmony reached out to a Seattle nonprofit for help getting out of Florida. The nonprofit, a trans-led organization called Traction, welcomed the couple with a place to sleep and money for moving.
But unbeknownst to Harmony, Traction was struggling, too.
Since the 2024 election, Traction has helped 1,500 trans people flee red states — more than 20 times the 70 people it aided in the 18 months before the election. And it’s just one of several Seattle nonprofits whose leaders say they don’t have the resources to help the number of trans people who’ve left their homes for the safety of the Pacific Northwest.
Though trans people make up just 1 percent of the population in Washington state, the nonprofits that help them say their budgets are drained and their staffs are stretched so thin that last month the Seattle LGBTQ Commission asked Mayor Katie Wilson (D) to declare a civil state of emergency. Such a declaration would free up general fund dollars to bolster the nonprofits’ finances as they help transplants find housing and jobs.
“The conditions,” the commission wrote in a June 2 letter to Wilson and the City Council, “are an urgent policy concern and a life-and-death matter for internal displaced persons fleeing to Seattle for safety.”
Because for several years on the olympic peninsula, fentanyl overdose displaced heart disease for leading cause of death. Opiate abuse is still incredibly high anywhere on the peninsulas outside the greater seattle suburb cities, far higher per capita even than in seattle proper. It's an incredibly rampant problem, driven mainly by the socioeconomic stagnation that makes people want to flee from those towns. I'm glad you're surviving, but I gotta be honest, in a discussion about the total lack of charity funding because of the massive demand for their services it's kinda weird to come in and suggest moving to places that are only slightly better, or to assume that those regions are what's being discussed instead of the massive region full of destitute conservatives.
I understand you want to correct someone you feel is maligning the region in which you live and your lived experience and so forth, but in this case I think you have misunderstood the fundemental premise.
It's not weird to suggest, at all. At no point did I suggest that it would fix anything. I was following the same thread as OP in that the surrounding areas are also welcoming and slightly cheaper. I have never, not once, called it cheap.
I think you are stuck on solving the systemic problem and are unable to see that there are plenty of queer people that can afford to live out here but not in Seattle, people just like me. People who escaped the very red states mentioned (again, like myself and several of my queer friends), to live on the peninsula. Some of whom have gotten support from these charities as well. It's not a black and white issue. If you hope for it to be completely solved for everyone, it's not going to happen overnight. It's systemic, shitting on the communities that make it work is not how you gain what you want.
The opiates are actually not relevant to this discussion at all, so it's ironic that you brought that up and now are saying that my suggestion was irrelevant. You seem to have some sort of idea about life out here, and that it hasn't changed at all. Do you live out here to know what it's like, or have you lived here within the last 10 or so years?